VIII This winter I have had two letters asking me how best to study the mosses and lichens, and I answered, “Begin now.” Winter, when the leaves are off, the ground bare, the birds and flowers gone, and all is reduced to singleness and simplicity--winter is the time to observe the shapes, colors, varieties, and growth of the lichens. Not that every lover of nature needs to know the long Latin names (and many of these lesser plants have no other names), but that every lover of the out-of-doors should notice them--the part they play in the color of things, the place they hold in the scheme of things, their exquisite shapes and strange habits. IX You should see the brook, “bordered with sparkling frost-work ... as gay as with its fringe of summer flowers.” You should examine under a microscope the wonderful crystal form of the snow-flakes--each flake shaped by an infinitely accurate hand according to a pattern that seems the perfection, the very poetry, of mechanical drawing. X What a world of gray days, waste lands, bare woods, and frozen waters there is to see! And you should see them--gray and bare and waste and frozen. But what is a frozen pond for if not to be skated on? and waste white lands, but to go sleighing over? and cold gray days, but so many opportunities to stay indoors with your good books? See the winter bleak and cheerless as at times you will, and as at times you ought; still if you will look twice, and think as you look, you will see the fishermen on the ponds catching pickerel through the ice--life swimming there under the frozen surface! You will see the bare empty woodland fresh budded to the tip of each tiny twig--life all over the trees thrust forward to catch the touch of spring! You will see the wide flinty fields thick sown with seeds--life, more life than the sun and the soil can feed, sleeping there under “the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow”! CHAPTER V CHRISTMAS IN THE WOODS “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.” But on the night before this particular Christmas every creature of the woods that could stir was up and stirring; for over the old snow was falling swiftly, silently, a soft, fresh covering that might mean a hungry Christmas unless the dinner were had before morning. Yet, when the morning dawned, a cheery Christmas sun broke across the great gum swamp, lighting the snowy boles and soft-piled limbs of the giant trees with indescribable glory, and pouring, a golden flood, into the deep, spongy bottom of the swamp below. It would be a perfect Christmas in the woods, clear, mild, stirless, with silent footing for me, and everywhere the telltale snow.