63 UPLAND AND MEADOW. 



that? Tlie mercury in the thermometer runs up and 

 down, with all the precision of a pendulum's side-wise 

 course. It is winter at night and, faintly, something else 

 at noon. The month comes and goes, at least this last 

 one came and went, with ice, snow, north winds, and all 

 the plagues of winter, yet it is said not to be that sea- 

 son, but something else. Just what, it would be hard 

 to say. 



As some lifelong wanderer, returning to the scenes of 

 his childhood, expects to find green the grave of his 

 grandsire, but, instead, meets the gentleman, still hale 

 and hearty, although a centenarian, so now, after a 

 night-long ramble in the land of dreams, I awake, not 

 to find flowers covering the grave of winter, but his 

 frosty grimness still overshadowing the land. 



If we have spring at all, it is limited to a brief part 

 of April, and is as little prominent as a season of the 

 year as is mortar between bricks or the thin layer of 

 cement between the dressed stones of the building. 



Even limiting the mythical season to half a month, 

 what are the distinctive evidences of its arrival? It is 

 not, as we have seen, a matter of temperature. To be 

 doubly sure of this, I asked a practical farmer when he 

 thought the season had fairly set in. " When it's too 

 warm to smoke on the south side of the barn," he re- 

 plied, and here, I found, he sat, half the winter, to enjoy 

 his post-prandial pipe. I asked him again, about bloom- 

 ing flowers; and he told me of dandelions and green 

 grass that had amused him " by their pluck, seein' some- 

 times they were covered with snow." 



Is spring the date of the reviving of hibernating 



