SPRING! SPRING! SPRING! 5 



sled and skates, put away your overcoat and mittens ; 

 for spring is here, and the honey-bees will buzz every 

 bright day until the October asters are in bloom. 



I said if you want springtime ahead of time you 

 must have it in your heart. Of course you must. 

 If your heart is warm and your eye is keen, you can 

 go forth in the dead of winter and gather buds, seeds, 

 cocoons, and living things enough to make a little 

 spring. For the fires of summer are never wholly 

 out. They are only banked in the winter, smoulder- 

 ing always under the snow, and quick to brighten 

 and burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in 

 January, and across your thawing path crawls a 

 woolly-bear caterpillar ; a mourning-cloak butter- 

 fly flits through the woods, and the j uncos sing. 

 That night a howling snowstorm sweeps out of the 

 north ; the coals are covered again. So they kindle 

 and darken, until they leap from the ashes of winter 

 a pure, thin blaze in the shadbush, to burn higher 

 and hotter across the summer, to flicker and die 

 away a line of yellow embers in the weird 

 witch-hazel of the autumn. 



At the sign of the shadbush the doors of my 

 springtime swing wide open. My birds are back, my 

 turtles are out, my long sleeping woodchucks are 

 wide awake. There is not a stretch of woodland or 

 meadow now that shows a trace of winter. Over the 

 pasture the bluets are beginning to drift, as if the 

 haze on the distant hills, floating down in the night, 



