At no time of year is the weakness of roothold so liable to be fatal to a tree as now. During the winter a gale may snap a tree off at the trunk and smash it bodily to the ground. But if there is no weakness in the trunk there can be none in the roots, for the frost that is set about them holds even the shortest, as if embedded in stone. But now, when the solvent ice has loosened the whole surface for a depth of a foot or more, leaving it fluffy and disintegrated, those trees which have no tap-roots and hold only in this lightened surface are in the greatest danger of uprooting of the whole year. Farmers often clear a shrubby pasture in late March or early April hereabout by taking advantage of this fact. They make a trace-chain fast about the base of a pasture cedar or a stout huckleberry bush, and with a word to the old horse the shrub is dragged from the softened earth, root and all. In mid-summer, after the ground has become compact, this is not to be done. It is the spring house-cleaning time of the year, when nature is sweeping and picking up, preparatory to laying new carpets and getting new furnishings throughout, and if any of the old furniture of the woodland is not able to stand the strain it has to go to the woodpile. Without the mad March winds the forest would lose much of its fresh virility, the old deadwood would cumber the new growth, and the mild melancholy of decay would prevail as it does in some swamps where sheltering surrounding hills and close growth shunt the gales. Yet, though house-cleanings are no doubt necessary and beneficient, few of us love them, and we hail with equal joy the resultant cleanliness and the cessation of the uproar. The two days’ gale finally got all the winds of the world piled up somewhere to the southward and ceased, and the piled-up atmosphere drifted back over us, bringing mild blue haze that was like smoke from the fires of summer floating far. All things that had been taut and dense relaxed into dimples or softened into tears. The frost went out of the plowed fields that morning, though the sun was too blurred with the kindly blue mist to have any force. It was just the general relaxation which did it. Then is apt to come a halcyon day, and though the kingfisher is not here to brood, nor will he be for a month, his fabled weather slips on in advance to cheer us. It may not last a day. March is as mad as April is fickle, and you will need to start early to be sure of it. Then, even if you come home in a snowstorm, you will at least have had a brief glimpse of that sunny softness which is dearer in March than in any other month.