THE SNOWFLAKE. a 
these simple-hearted creatures, who refuse to budge from their native heaths 
and tree-boles, lack not only the culture of travel in foreign parts, but the dash 
and wild romance of those who hazard their fortune to the north wind. What 
treasures of choice spirits are poured out upon us when the winds blow raw 
and the streams hide their faces! Hardy Norsemen they,—the Redpolls, the 
Longspurs, the Horned Larks, and the Snowflakes. ‘They burst upon us in the 
wake of the first storm, and set up in our back pastures a wintry Valhalla, 
where good cheer of a very sturdy sort reigns supreme. 
In spite of striking differences of form and color a strange similarity exists 
among these northern visitors, so that one may easily construct a mental genre 
picture—or, at most, two such—which will fairly represent them all. Thus the 
Snowflakes, the Longspurs, the Horned Larks,—and through them even the 
daft Pipits—have a common fashion of giving themselves to the air to be blown 
about at hazard; or, when the season advances, of setting their faces also with 
equal steadfastness against the gainsaying of the blast. Their notes, too, (ex- 
cepting this time the inane yipping of the Pipit) have a wierd wind-born quality 
which is inseparable in thought from the shrill piping of the storm. To carry 
the matter further, the Siskins, the Crossbills, the Purple Flinches and the 
Redpolls have each a mellow rattle, which lends itself with equal facility to that 
generic conception of the ice-berg children. The dialect may differ, but in all 
of them the accent 1s 
Hyperborean. 
I well remember 
my first meeting 
with that prince of 
storm waits, the 
Snowflake. It was 
in eastern Washing- 
ton, where the cli- 
mate is not less hos- 
pitable than that of 
much lower latitudes 
farther east. A dis- 
tant-faring, feat h- 
ered stranger had ano 
tempted me far IN SNOWFLAKE PARK. 
afield, when, all at once, a fluttering snowdrift, contrary to nature’s wont, rose 
from earth toward heaven. I held my breath while I listened to the mild Babel 
of tut-ut-ut-tews with which the Snow Buntings greeted me. The birds 
were loath to leave the place, and hovered indecisively while the bird-man 
drank them in. As they moved slowly off each bird seemed alternately to fall 
and struggle upward through an arc of five or six feet, independently of his 
Photo 
by the 
Author. 
