Things One Sees in IVinter 269 



dees and mountain sparrows. All the viburnums 

 and vacciniums give the birds food. So does the 

 Indian poke, a plant so superb in its free growth 

 and royal crimson colouring that it ought to be a 

 favourite in gardens, where it will make itself at 

 home as easily as the sumachs will. The sumachs 

 are also great bird stores, and when the birds were 

 in the habit of coming back from the South in 

 great flocks, the sumach thickets gave their earliest 

 plunder. In the winter hills a natural plantation 

 of sumachs, whether of the staghorn, the glabra or 

 the little copallina species, fill the landscape with 

 vivid fire, lighting up all the region round about. 

 There is nothing else that produces so fine an ef 

 fect of warm colour except the bittersweet, when 

 with its yellow-wrapped orange berries it takes a 

 thicket for its own. There is much warmth, too, 

 in the lingering leaves of the young oaks, and es 

 pecially, in this vicinity, the abundant thatch, 

 which brings a touch of summer to the coldest 

 day. 



In the woods there are all the mosses and lichens 

 of the rocks and stumps to interest one, and in 

 these there is an endless pleasure, as one sees how 

 life is ever active, asserting the universal presence 

 of God. It is in beholding such little things 

 that the lover of Nature most surely feels the truth 

 that Walt Whitman expressed : &quot; And a kelson 



