t-^t (mu0ftrat0 ate (^xdfbmg 



and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to 

 beat. 



I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid 

 lumps of ice in the laboratory. Drop the lump on the 

 floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment 

 of the ice itself. And this has happened more than 

 once to the same frog without causing him the least 

 apparent suffering or inconvenience. He would come 

 to, and croak, and look as wise as ever. 



The north wind may blow, 



but the muskrats are building ; and it is by no 

 means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow 

 world of mine in the gray November light. The 

 frost will not fall to-night as falls the plague on men ; 

 the brightness of the summer is gone, yet this chill 

 gloom is not the sombre shadow of a pall. Nothing 

 is dying in the fields : the grass-blades are wilting, 

 the old leaves are falling, but no square foot of 

 greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree 

 perhaps in my wood-lot. There will be no less of 

 life next April because of this winter, unless, per- 

 chance, conditions altogether exceptional starve some 

 of the winter birds. These suffer most ; yet as the 



15 



