and drift, so that the birds shall breakfast at every hazard. The sun- 

 flower stands through the winter storms unintimidated and is gray in 

 color like a winter's dusk when clouds are over all the sky, and the 

 leaves in the woods are rusty as iron, and the red oak-trees keep their 

 leaves, a kindly shelter for the houseless birds; and what a brave winter 

 themselves made ! I have been beneath them on winter days when the 

 sun was bright and genial and when I walked without a shiver, but step- 

 ping beneath the oak-trees and closing my eyes and listening to the 

 whetting of leaf against leaf, I began to shiver as with nipping cold. 

 Winter leaves in the wind sound so wintery. Winter stays on this farm. 

 Then spring comes laughing like happy lovers. The earth smell is. 

 in the air, the frogs sing every night and very early in the spring from 

 the ravines, the tenant plows the brown fields and turns them into black 

 and the crow follows in the furrows, so do the blackbirds with their 

 garrulous conversation ; and the meadow lark, before a sprig of green is 

 anywhere, tunes his voice to sing a spring poem, and I wonder if there is 

 anything sweeter than a meadow lark's music floating over brown fields 

 which have been mute in bird voices these months past. On my farm 

 the meadow lark is the courier of the spring. Nobody is as welcome as 

 he, with the splotches of yellow flecking his breast and his springy step 

 as if he owns this meadow, and his constant tryst with the open field 

 (he will have none of the forest) there he spills out his music, thence 

 he whirrs his springy flight. Sometimes he will tilt a minute on a 

 fence-post, but I do not recall seeing him on this farm in a hedge-row. 

 There the golden thrush loves to live, but the meadow lark lives on the 

 ground where we men and women walk. I would be pouting all the 

 spring if he did not come. Contact with the earth gives him his gift of 

 singing. He is a sweet son of the soil and dear to the heart as love. 

 The blue jay is belligerent and garrulous, but he stays with me through 

 the winter sometimes and comes very early in the spring, and I love. his 

 untuned voice as it cuts through the air like a sword swish. I give him 

 warm welcome and am glad he is come. His morals I can not control; 

 I have trouble enough with my own ; but if he did not come to my woods 

 I would be out of humor. The red bud gets the earliest color from the 

 skies and wears it a trifle haughtily, being as I take it, a sort of vege- 

 table aristocrat. The red buds have no beautiful curve like the elm, 

 but stand angular as soldiers on guard. Though they think themselves 

 aristocrats I will not quarrel with their self opinionation. They are 

 here and they like my farm and are the earliest colors the woods wear. 



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