NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS 



creeper and the juncos. Not one bird is hospitable 

 to another. Each seems to look upon the suet as its 

 special find. 



The more inclement the season, the more our 

 sympathy goes out to our little wild neighbors who 

 face it and survive it. The tracks of the mice and 

 the squirrels in the winter woods have an interest 

 for one they could not possibly have in summer were 

 they visible then. O frost and snow, where is your 

 victory? O white and barren solitude, thou art not 

 all-potent! How distinctly I remember where our 

 schoolboy path through the woods crossed an old 

 bush fence, and the fresh prints in the snow of the 

 feet of the red and gray squirrels to whom the old 

 fence served as a highway. Those sharp, nervous, 

 hurried tracks and the silent, snow-choked woods, 

 — silent except when the frost pistols snapped now 

 and then, — how vivid the picture of it all is in my 

 memory! 



The delicate tracks of the wood mice and their 

 tunnels up through the snow here and there beside 

 our path — they are still unfaded in my mind, after 

 a lapse of more than seventy years. Occasionally the 

 stealthy track of a red fox would cross our trail both 

 in field and wood — never hurried like that of the 

 mice and the squirrels and the hares, but slow — 

 a watchful, listening walker in the midnight winter 

 solitude. 



Wild life in winter is like black print on a while 



209 



