FRESHENED BY FROST 413 



a woodcock to the soft place in the wood that usually 

 attracts the bird when other haunts are frozen. 

 Though we have often had evidence that the feeding 

 there is far from indifferent, it is a place held strictly 

 in reserve, for as soon as the thaw begins there is no 

 more hope of finding a woodcock within a mile of it. 

 Wherever our late visitor may be, if he were shot 

 to-day he would be found to be perfectly fat. 



The tender, defenceless flowers have escaped no 

 less safely than the birds and animals. Who would 

 believe that those fragile blossoms which were lately 

 the wonder of our record autumn could withstand that 

 cracking frost and the drive of the ice-storm ? We 

 saw them yield point by point to the obliterating 

 snowflakes, and expected to see them no more. In 

 the blizzard they became fleurs glactes, but when the 

 thaw unprisoned them, the tears merely rolled off 

 them, and they smiled again as confidently as 

 before. In their glass-houses the cold, half of which 

 would have wilted them had they been bare, could 

 not harm them. The ice-needles that were hurled 

 against them, even if they had entered their tissues, 

 would not have torn them as would drops of water 

 forced in, then expanded on freezing. So the late 

 frost has not torn the alder-catkins on which the 

 tits wait, or the fir-cones whose seeds the green- 

 finches would gladly see; nor has it cut flakes from 

 the wall nor burst the lithe branches of the ash, nor 

 even spoilt the progress of the veronica and pimpernel 

 that have covered the ploughing with plants on which 

 you can still find blossoms. 



It is a truism that a fall of snow keeps the earth 

 warm. There is also a mechanical perfection about 



