214 A BIRD-LOVER'S APRIL. 



said. The '* summer boarder " went to church, 

 of course. To have done otherwise might have 

 been taken for a confession of weakness ; as if 

 inclemency of this sort were more than he had 

 bargained for. The villagers, lacking any such 

 spur to right conduct, for the most part stayed 

 at home ; feeling it not unpleasant, I dare say, 

 some of them, to have a natural inclination 

 providentially confirmed, even at the cost of an 

 hour's exercise with the shovel. The bravest 

 parishioner of all, and the sweetest singer, — 

 the song sparrow by name, — was not in the 

 meeting-house, but by the roadside. What if 

 the wind did blow, and the mercury stand at 

 fifteen or twenty degrees below the freezing 

 point ? In cold as in heat " the mind is its own 

 place." 



Three days after this came a second storm, 

 one of the heaviest snow-falls of the year. The 

 robins were reduced to picking up seeds in the 

 asparagus bed. The bluebirds appeared to be 

 trying to glean something from the bark of 

 trees, clinging rather awkwardly to the trunk 

 meanwhile. (They are given to this, more or 

 less, at all times, and it possibly has some con- 

 nection with their half-woodpeckerish habit of 

 nestling in holes.) Some of the snow-birds 

 were doing likewise ; I noticed one traveling up 

 a trunk, — which inclined a good deal, to be 



