Here are ten different things for you to see this winter, and most of them, whether you live in the city or country, you can see, provided you live where the snow falls. But you will have some kind of a winter no matter where you live. Don’t miss it--its storms, its birds, its animals, its coasting, skating, snowshoeing, its invitations to tramp the frozen marshes and deep swamps where you cannot go in the summer, and where, on the snow you will catch many a glimpse of wild life that the rank summer sedges will never reveal. Don’t stop with these ten suggestions; there are a hundred other interesting things to see. And as you see them, write about them. CHAPTER V TO THE TEACHER Let this chapter be read very close to the Christmas recess, when your children’s minds are full of Christmas thoughts. This unconventional turn to the woods, this thought of Christmas among the animals and birds, might easily be the means of awakening many to an understanding of the deeper, spiritual side of nature-study--that we find in Nature only what we take to her; that we get back only what we give. It will be easy for them to take the spirit of Christmas into the woods because they are so full of it; and so it will be easy for them to feel the woods giving it back to them--the very last and best reward of nature-study. No, don’t be afraid that they are incapable of such lessons, of such thoughts and emotions. Some few may be; but no teacher ever yet erred by too much faith in the capacity of her pupils for the higher, deeper things. FOR THE PUPIL PAGE 46 These lines of poetry you all know. But who can tell who wrote them? Where did he live and when? _gum swamp:_ See description of such a swamp on pages 262-263 of the author’s “Wild Life Near Home.” This is the tree known as sour gum, more properly tupelo (_Nyssa sylvatica_ or _uniflora_). _cardinal grosbeak:_ Commonly called “cardinal,” or “redbird.” PAGE 47 _Holy Day:_ What was the oldest form of our word “holiday”? _ilex:_ _Ilex verticillata_, the black alder, or winterberry, one of the holly family. A low swamp bush covered with red berries all winter. PAGE 48 _Lupton’s Pond:_ A little pond along Cohansey Creek near Bridgeton, N. J. _Persimmon trees_: found from New Haven, Conn., to Florida. PAGE 50 _Bob Cratchit’s goose:_ There never was such a goose, as you all know who have read Dickens’s “Christmas Carol.” PAGE 52 _liquid amber:_ The balsamic juice of the sweet gum tree, sometimes called “bilsted” (_Liquidambar styraciflua_), a large, beautiful swamp tree found from Connecticut to Florida and west to Texas. PAGE 53 _half-human tracks:_ Because the coon is a relative of the bears and has a long hind foot that leaves a track much like that of a small baby. PAGE 54