48 LIFE OF A TREE. 
little knowledge of Botany enables us to see, in 
these simple but effective protections, marks of 
a Creator’s wisdom, traces of a Father’s love. 
Are there no snow-storm epochs of the human 
life, in which the instructed eye may not, if it 
will look for them, see the same, causing the 
heart to acknowledge that in the darkest hours 
He is nigh, and that, be the trial never so sharp, 
it is not without its alleviations ! 
The long days of Winter move gradually on; 
now cold and sharp with frost, now dark and low- 
ering with snow, and occasionally wet and chilling 
with half-frozen rain. The plant is, as it were, 
asleep. ‘To look at its stiff and naked branches, 
one would say it was altogether dead; and if we 
were to thrust a sharp weapon into its trunk, not 
even a drop of fluid would escape from the 
wound, It is waiting for the Spring, and while 
it waits it sleeps; and so ends the first year of 
the Life of a Tree. 
But as the Earth rolls on her endless path, 
gradually a warmer air wraps her round in this 
our hemisphere. The ice-chain begins to be 
loosed, though now and then a sharp frosty night 
will close the cold links again. The great Sun 
