“Interested to discover the secret of such a great feathery convocation, I crept up to the edge of the slippery drift and looked over. Beyond the fence rose the steep, white, glistening slope of the pasture, a distance of a furlong or more, its surface mottled with its brown withered vegetation. Following the rambling rails on either side were drifts of the most fantastic form, now and then almost peering above the fence riders, and between them ran a winding valley, in which the old fence seemed to be walking knee-deep in snow. It needed only a second glance into this hollow, whence the startled flocks had flown, to understand its attractiveness for the birds. Its depths were fairly littered with the choicest kind of allurement. The very cream of the pasture had flowed into this trough. It was the hopper which had received the entire wind-blown tribute of the weedy upland that looked down upon it, and of the overhanging woods far up the slope. Here were wind-rows of various seeds which had been dislodged from the weeds and trees and blown along the glassy snow to be caught in this convenient bin. The small goblet-shaped hollows around the projecting grass-stems were full to the brim with their good cheer, and the deeper vales and gullies were marked out everywhere by their brown meandering lines of intermingled chaff and seeds, often to the depth of two inches or more. A happy valley and a land of plenty, surely! “A single handful of this grist taken up at random presented a surprising variety of elements, offering a wide choice for the most fastidious bird appetite. Curious to test this question further, I followed the fence for a long distance, occasionally sampling the meadow crumbs, and continually discovering some new ingredient of fruit or seed.