The thermometer marked a temperature of but a few degrees below freezing, but it was the coldest day of the winter. The bite of the wind off Hudson’s Bay is as nothing to the chill which the Arctic sea-water folds in its unfrozen heart as it sweeps from polar depths down the west coast of Greenland, along the Labrador shore, round Newfoundland and down again, shouldering into Massachusetts Bay; the reserve corps of the winter’s assault, the Old Guard plunging desperately to its Waterloo in the face of all-conquering spring. This chill the east wind had caught up from the green depths of the surges he tossed, and made it the poison of the points which he drove desperately home. Face this wind for a day and you shall feel the venom working long after you have sought shelter, nor shall even the cheer of a big open fire drive it easily from your bones. Yet you may draw from the chill this cheer, if you will, that no longer is the worst yet to come; it is here and soon the prospect must mend. It seems odd to think that some day next July we shall sniff this frigidity drawn from the depths of the boreal current, borne on the wings of the east wind, and revel in the intoxicating ozone with which it soothes our heat-fevered nostrils. Over on the bog edge are twenty-seven lodges, built of bog turf and roots, dead grass and rushes, almost any rubbish in fact which Mussascus, as Captain John Smith called him, has been able to get in the neighborhood. Each has a foundation of some sort; one a stump submerged in the muck, another a rude framework of alder sticks which the muskrat cuts with his strong, chisel-like teeth and brings in his mouth as a beaver would; others variously upheld, but all so placed that the entrance may be beneath the water and beneath the ice also, however thick it may freeze. Little does the muskrat care for my marrow-piercing east wind. I’ll wager that he never knows it blows, for rarely indeed at this time of year does he put his nose out where he might feel it. His stairway leads from the under-water entrance to a cosy and comfortable nest lined with soft grass where he and his fellows cuddle. The mud-smeared, water-soaked material of their walls is frozen to adamant. It is porous enough in spots to give them air for breathing but does not let the cold wind enter. It is as snug and safe a place as any one could devise. An enemy must break through from without and long before he can smash the frozen walls Mussascus has slipped into the water and gone his way beneath the ice, first to another tepee, or if driven from that on again to his burrows in the hard bank a thousand feet away.