I was two miles further toward the Plymouth woods and was broiling a chop for my dinner on the fork of a witch-hazel stick over the lovely clear flame of dry white pine limbs, when I came across the second new thing of my experience in the winter woods. That was black snow. It was on the northerly edge of an open meadow, a spot so tangled with wild rose and other slender shrubs that it was next to impossible to penetrate it. For some reason the south wind had failed to carry off all the snow here, and a thin coating of it lay on the ground. There was a bit of open water on the edge of the tangle, and I noticed that this was covered with a black coating. Going down to look closer I found that the snow as far as I could look into the meadow was covered with this same surface, making it fairly black. It looked quite like the soot from black coal, but when I poked at it with my finger to see if it smutted it hopped nimbly away. The open pool and the snow all about it was covered with tiny black fleas or some similar skipping minute insect. I was curious about these tiny black creatures, and I folded many of them carefully in a leaf of my note book, creasing the edges firmly so that I might keep them tight, and put them in my scrip. I intended to put them under a microscope and see how many legs they had for all this wonderful skipping; but they had too many for me. When I got home the paper was blank. They had all skipped. AMONG THE MUSKRAT LODGES I always know the sound of the east wind as it comes over the Blue Hills for the twanging of the bow from which winter has shot his Parthian arrow. The keenest it is in all his quiver of keen darts, for it penetrates joints in one’s armor that no gale from Arctic barrens has been able to reach, that no fall of snow or of temperature has weakened. Facing it to-day and feeling its barbs turn in the marrow of my breastbone as I crossed Ponkapoag Pond I began to wonder how it fared with my friends the muskrats who were wintering in the very teeth of it over on the northwest shore. And so I turned my shoulder to the blow and my face to the bog where tepees in a long line spire conically out of the brown grasses on the bog edge, where the pickerel weed flaunted blue banners all summer long.