NOVEMBER. 185 



year ; and although there may be little to show for it 

 at first, they continue to work indoors whenever the 

 weather permits throughout the winter. This, there- 

 fore, is not the end of the year to them, but its 

 beginning. A potato, hidden away in a dark cellar 

 where the temperature scarcely changes, sprouts at 

 the same time as its fellows who have been taken 

 out and planted where the warmth of spring sunlight 

 can reach them ; and it does this because it has been 

 working, like them, during the winter, and, when the 

 proper chemical changes have taken place in its sub- 

 stance, it pushes out shoots as they do. For want of 

 light and warmth the shoots may remain thin and 

 white, while the plants outside bear a luxuriant green 

 haulm ; but during the winter it had worked as hard 

 as they did for the coming summer. The potato in 

 autumn, as a separate living entity apart from the 

 dead plant which bore it and its brothers, is proof 

 that the new year really begins with the fall of the 

 leaf. In November, too, you will find that the ground 

 is covered with little seedlings, all trying to steal a 

 inarch upon each other, before frost and snow compel 

 a rest ; and certainly so far as these seedlings, the 

 earliest of next summer's plants, are concerned, winter 

 is not the " end " of their year. 



THE BIRDS' NEW YEAR. 



With the birds, too, convention fixes the beginning 

 of their year in the middle of February, when they 

 are supposed to recognize St. Valentine's influence 

 by pairing and setting up housekeeping without delay ; 

 but if we could ask their opinion, a twittering majority 



