Then I skated away to get my camera and was gone three-quarters of an hour. Returning I saw him in the distance, for the snow had almost passed. He saw me too and dived. Gliding up I knelt at the very edge of the hole and was fixing the camera when he came up. He sat level on the surface for a second, seemingly not noticing me. Then, warned by a motion that I made in trying to adjust the focus, he sounded a wild and plaintive call that seemed to have in it mingled fear and defiance, heartbreak and triumph, and plunged beneath the surface with a vigor and decision that sent him far beneath the ice, his great webbed feet driving him with great jumps, as a frog swims. I saw him shoot away from the hole, trailing bubbles. I waited kneeling, watch in hand and thumb on bulb, a minute, two minutes, three, five, ten. The snow shut in again thick, the north wind sang a plaintive dirge and I realized that the picture would never be taken. Instead I was kneeling at the deathbed of a wild Northern spirit that perhaps deliberately took that way of ending the unequal struggle. The loon knows not the land. Even his nest he builds on the water’s edge and clambers awkwardly to it with wings and bill as well as feet. The air and water are his home, the water far more than the air, and he knows the underwater world as well as he does the surface. I shall never know whether my loon went so far in his flight beneath the ice that he failed to find his way back, or whether his strength gave out. Knowing his untamed and fearless spirit I am inclined to believe that he deliberately elected to die at home, in the cool depths that he loved rather than come back to his poor refuge in the narrowing ice circle and face that strange creature that knelt at the edge. WINTER FERN-HUNTING The spring of this, our new year of 1909, is set by the wise makers of calendars to begin at the vernal equinox, say the twenty-first of March, but the weatherwise know that on that date eastern Massachusetts is still in the thrall of winter, and spring, as they see it, is not due till a month later. Yet they are both wrong, and we need but go into the woods now to prove it. The spring in fact is already here. The new life in which it is to express itself in a thousand forms is already growing and much of it had its beginning in late August or early September of last year. The wind out of the north may retard it indeed, but it needs but a touch of the south wind to start it in motion again, and the deep snows that are yet to come and bury it so that the waves of arctic atmosphere that may roll over its head for weeks will never be able to touch it are a help.