406 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



and keep appointment with its caterpillar for a given 

 week in May, than in the furred animal that sleeps 

 like the dead in a dry attic. It is hibernation, 

 though, that most readily wins our admiration the 

 care of an apparently sapient individual for its own 

 skin, the mechanism of a grown and intricate organ- 

 ism that allows an apparently total abeyance of the 

 vital functions and an ensuing resurrection. 



In our temperate climate hibernation is very 

 slightly and fitfully practised. When the globe has 

 swung down, down in its northern trend till it stops 

 for a day or two at the lowest point as though every 

 year there was some doubt whether it would ever face 

 the sun again, many things are asleep badger, 

 squirrel, dormouse, vole, shrew, and in a real cold 

 winter several other considerable animals. But there 

 is probably not one calendar month in which any one 

 of them has not been seen abroad. The mildness 

 of our winter is often their bane. It would be better 

 for them to sleep soundly till the whole world was 

 ready to waken at once ; honeyed flowers for the 

 bees ; insects and herbage as food for hedgehog and 

 vole ; frogs, mice, and eggs in the nest for those of 

 grosser appetites. The fat accumulated at the 

 autumn feast would serve a sleeping animal as well 

 for four months as for two, while it is very trying 

 and often fatal to awaken in the middle of a foodless 

 night under the impression that warmth and plenty 

 have come again. The tragedy presents itself every 

 year in the shape of slow-worms cut off by sudden 

 frost from the return to their hibernaculum, of dor- 

 mouse or squirrel dead beside the emptied store that 

 should not have been attacked till March, of thou- 



