But here are the winter woods at night, and the wide, moonlit fields, covered, it may be, with the glistening snow. The full, round moon rides high overhead, the pointed corn-shocks stand silent over the fields, the woods rise dark and shadowy beyond. Only the slow, musical cry of the hound echoes through the stirless air, which seems to sparkle like the snow, as if filled with gleaming frost-dust that only the moonlight can catch and set to glancing silvery-bright. You don’t care whether you catch a ’possum or not; you are abroad in a world so large and silent, so crystal-clear and shining, so crisp, so open, so acreep with shadows, so deep and mysterious in its distances, so pure and beautiful and unblemished, that just to be abroad is wonder enough, and you are not sorry to come back under the brilliant midnight sky with the old dog at your heels and over your shoulder an empty bag. But if your bag is heavy with fat ’possum then that, too, is good. You have peered into his black hole; you have reached in and pulled him out--nothing more. No roar of a gun has shattered your world of crystal; you have killed nothing, wounded nothing--no, not even the silence and the serenity of your soul. You and the clear, calm night are still one. You have dropped a smiling ’possum into an easy, roomy bag. He feels warm against your back. The old dog follows proud and content at your heels. And you feel--as the wide, softly shining sky seems to feel. And that, too, is peculiar. CHAPTER X A FEBRUARY FRESHET One of the very interesting events in my out-of-door year is the February freshet. Perhaps you call it the February _thaw_. That is all it could be called this year; and, in fact, a _thaw_ is all that it ever is for me, nowadays, living, as I do, high and dry here, on Mullein Hill, above a sputtering little trout brook that could not have a freshet if it tried. But Maurice River could have a freshet without trying. Let the high south winds, the high tides, and the warm spring rains come on together, let them drive in hard for a day and a night, as I have known them to do, and the deep, dark river goes mad! The tossing tide sweeps over the wharves, swirls about the piles of the great bridge, leaps foaming into the air, and up and down its long high banks beats with all its wild might to break through into the fertile meadows below. There are wider rivers, and other, more exciting things, than spring freshets; but there were not when I was a boy. Why, Maurice River was so wide that there was but a single boy in the town, as I remember, who could stand at one end of the drawbridge and skim an oyster-shell over to the opposite end! The best that I could do was to throw my voice across and hear it echo from the long, hollow barn on the other bank. It would seem to me to strike the barn in the middle, leap from end to end like a creature caged, and then bound back to me faint and frightened from across the dark tide.