WINTER NEIGHBORS. 
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 or- 
chard for buds; the rabbit comes to the garden and 
lawn; the crows and jays come to the ash-heap and 
corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and to the 
barn-yard; 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 ca 
lamity, changes the status of most creatures and sets 
them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us ac- 
quainted with strange bedfellows. 
For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bed- 
fellow is the little gray rabbit that has taken up her 
abode under my study floor. As she spends the day 
