914 Rural School Leaflet. 



4. The nest is composed of rootlets, straws, and grasses, and generally 

 lined with long hairs. The eggs are blue and vary considerably in the 

 amount of brown spots and blotches covering them. 



SOMETHING ABOUT OUTDOOR LIFE IN WINTER 

 From A Year in the Fields, By John Burroughs 



" The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the 

 winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the 

 cultivated, is hidden or negatived. You shall hardly know a good field 

 from a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a forest. Lines 

 and boundaries are disregarded ; gates and bar-ways are unclosed ; man 

 lets go his hold upon the earth ; title-deeds are deep buried beneath 

 the snow ; the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of nature ; under the 

 pressure of the cold, all the wild creatures become outlaws, and roam 

 abroad beyond their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the orchard 

 for buds ; the rabbit comes to tlie garden and lawn ; the crows and jays 

 come to the ash-heap and corn-crib, the snow buntings to the stack 

 and to the barnyard; the sparrows pilfer from the domestic fowls; 

 the pine grosbeak comes down from the north and shears your maples 

 of their buds; the fox prowls about your premises at night and the red 

 squirrels find your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts from your 

 attic. In fact, winter, like some great calamity, changes the status of 

 most creatures and sets them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us 

 acquainted with strange bedfellows. 



" For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bedfellow is the 

 little gray rabbit that has taken up her abode under my study floor. 

 As she spends the day here and is out larking at night, she is not much 

 of a bedfellow, after all. It is probable that I disturb her slumbers 

 more than she does mine, I think she is some support to me under 

 there, — a silent, wide-eyed witness and backer ; a type of the gentle 

 and harmless in savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me or lend 

 me, but that soft, nimble foot of hers, and that touch as of cotton where- 

 ever she goes, are worthy of emulation. I think I can feel her goodwill 

 through the floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a happy 

 thought, I imagine her ears twitch, especially when I think of the sweet 

 apple I will place by her doorway at night. I wonder if that fox chanced 

 to catch a glimpse of her the other night when he steathily leaped over 

 the fence near by and walked along between the study and the house? 

 How clearly one could read that it was not a little dog that had passed 

 there ! There was something furtive in the track ; it shied off away from 



