96 DAYS OUT OF DOORS. 



couragement dogged our steps from the moment of leav- 

 ing home until, as the day closed, we re-entered the 

 house. 



Such empty days are by no means valueless. They 

 teach at least the uncertainty of bird migration, and like- 

 wise th'e fickleness of resident species. Why, indeed, the 

 latter should have forsaken us is a puzzle I have no hopes 

 of solving. To walk for hours about a favorite haunt 

 of winter birds and see a solitary chickadee only is not 

 an experience to recall except with disgust, yet such was 

 ours one chilly, gusty, yet cloudless April morning. Even 

 the crested tit, that storm-defying hero that the winter 

 long had cheered the naked woods, and whose notes are, 

 of all sounds in early April, the surest to revivify our 

 drooping hopes even it forsook the home hill-side for 

 an entire week. But the world turned over a new leaf 

 on the twenty-eighth, and summer may be said to date 

 from that bright morning, for spring as a season is a 

 baseless myth. < 



April is not wholly at the mercy of the weather. 

 Many a plant, as well as bird, flourishes in spite of frost 

 or snow or ice ; and lately we have had all three. The 

 black and wintry waters of the meadow ponds, that seem 

 but a little way off to be well-nigh fathomless, are really 

 shallow, and what little warmth the fitful sun vouchsafes 

 is carefully husbanded. The host of crowding water weeds 

 risk the chill nights and scarcely less frosty days, and 

 unless it be such a memorable year as 1816, when there 

 was ice every month, they suffer nothing. Yearly the 

 farmer frowns at April frosts, declaring that he will be 

 ruined. His sad prognostications always recall the annual 

 destruction of the rarely destroyed peach crop. 



There was little but strictly wintry weather in April, 

 1888, and the average tree and plant were two weeks later 



