WINTER NEIGHBORS. 



. The country is more of a wilderness, more of a 

 wild solitude, in the winter than in the summer. The 

 wild comes out. The urban, the cultivated, is hidden 

 or negatived. You shall hardly know a good field 

 from a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a 

 forest. Lines and boundaries are disregarded ; gates 

 and bar-ways are unclosed ; man lets go his hold upon 

 the earth; title-deeds are deep buried beneath the 

 snow; the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of 

 nature; under the pressure of the cold all the wild 

 creatures become outlaws, and roam abroad beyond 

 their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the or- 

 chard for buds ; the rabbit comes to the garden and 

 lawn ; the crows and jays come to the ash-heap and 

 corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and to the 

 barn-yard ; tne sparrows pilfer from the domestic 

 fowls ; the pine grosbeak comes down from the north 

 and shears your maples of their buds ; the fox prowls 

 about your premises at night, and the red squirrels 

 find your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts 

 from ycur attic. In fact, winter, like some great ca» 

 lamity, changes the status of most creatures and sets 

 them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us ac- 

 quainted with strange bedfellows. 



For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bed- 

 fellow is the little gray rabbit that has taken up her 

 abode under my study floor. As she spends the day 



