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 
