When the snow hardens, especially after a strong wind, go out to see what you can find in the wind furrows of the snow--in the holes, hollows, pockets, and in footprints in the snow. Nothing? Look again, closely--that dust--wind-sweepings--seeds! Yes, seeds. Gather several small boxes of them and when you return home take a small magnifying glass and make them out--the sticktights, gray birches, yellow birches, pines, ragweeds, milfoil--I cannot number them! It is a lesson in the way the winds and the snows help to plant the earth. Last winter I followed for some distance the deep frozen tracks of a fox, picking out the various seeds that had drifted into every footprint, just so far apart, as if planted in the snow by some modern planting-machine. It was very interesting. V When the snow lies five or six inches deep, walk out along the fence-rows, roadsides, and old fields to see the juncos, the sparrows, and goldfinches feeding upon the seeds of the dead weeds standing stiff and brown above the snow. Does the sight mean anything to you? What does it mean? VI Burns has a fine poem beginning-- “When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r,” in which, he asks,-- “Ilk happing bird--wee, helpless thing!-- * * * * * What comes o’ thee? Whare wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing, An’ close thy e’e?” Did you ever ask yourself the question? Go forth, then, as the dusk begins to fall one of these chill winter days and try to see “what comes o’” the birds, where they sleep these winter nights. You will find an account of my own watching in a chapter called “Birds’ Winter Beds” in “Wild Life Near Home.” VII You will come back from your watching in the dusk with the feeling that a winter night for the birds is unspeakably dreary, perilous, and chill. You will close the door on the darkness outside with a shiver as much from dread as from the cold. “List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,”-- you will think of the partridge beneath the snow, the crow in his swaying pine-top, the kinglet in the close-armed cedar, the wild duck riding out the storm in his freezing water-hole, and you will be glad for your four thick walls and downy blankets, and you will wonder how any creature can live through the long, long night of cold and dark and storm. But there is another view of this same picture; another picture, rather, of this same stormy, bitter night which you must not miss seeing. Go out to see how the animals sleep, what beds they have, what covers to keep off the cold: the mice in the corn-shocks; the muskrats in their thick mud homes; the red squirrels in their rocking, wind-swung beds, so soft with cedar bark and so warm that never a tooth of the cold can bite through! “I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer Shook off the pouthery snaw, And hail’d the morning with a cheer, A cottage-rousing craw.”