24 SIGNS AND SEASONS 



appears to start in several things simultaneously. 

 Of a warm thawy day in February the snow is 

 suddenly covered with myriads of snow fleas look- 

 ing like black, new powder just spilled there. Or 

 you may see a winged insect in the air. On the 

 selfsame day the grass in the spring run and the 

 catkins on the alders will have started a little; and 

 if you look sharply, while passing along some shel- 

 tered nook or grassy slope where the sunshine lies 

 warm on the bare ground, you will probably see a 

 grasshopper or two. The grass hatches out under 

 the snow, and why should not the grasshopper 1 ? 

 At any rate, a few such hardy specimens may be 

 found in the latter part of our milder winters 

 wherever the sun has uncovered a sheltered bit of 

 grass for a few days, even after a night of ten or 

 twelve degrees of frost. Take them in the shade, 

 and let them freeze stiff as pokers, and when thawed 

 out again they will hop briskly. And yet, if a poet 

 were to put grasshoppers in his winter poem, we 

 should require pretty full specifications of him, or 

 else fur to clothe them with. Nature will not be 

 cornered, yet she does many things in a corner and 

 surreptitiously. She is all things to all men; she 

 has whole truths, half truths, and quarter truths, if 

 not still smaller fractions. The careful observer 

 finds this out sooner or later. Old fox-hunters will 

 tell you, on the evidence of their own eyes, that 

 there is a black fox and a silver-gray fox, two 

 species, but there are not; the black fox is black 

 when coming toward you or running from you, and 



