THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 37 



The snow was beginning to retreat down the mountain 

 side. It still held in the woods, but here in the road it 

 was in full rout, and beside the road, too, the brook had 

 risen to a rushing, milky torrent which eddied about the 

 stems of the alders and swayed their swollen buds like 

 some silent, violent wind. 



There comes a day in the first advent of Spring when a 

 perverse thermometer, which has been plunging nightly 

 below frost line and creeping too briefly up at noon, sud- 

 denly takes a jump. The air is balmy, the sun is 

 bright, there has been no frost the night before to make a 

 glistening mud-skin on the walks; the dead leaves, which 

 have apparently rotted down during the winter, are dry, 

 at least on the surface, and rustle about in a caressing 

 wind. Though snowdrifts yet linger under the ever- 

 greens and in northward shelters, the footing is firm over 

 the lawn, and the woods call. You cross fields that are 

 bare of snow, the brown and palest straw colour of dead 

 weeds and grasses, and enter the woods on the first 

 slope of the mountain. What an exquisite world it is! 

 The birches shine white, as if new-washed by Winter. 

 The chestnuts are gray, the poplars have a yellow tinge. 

 The forest floor, lying plain to view now with no shadow- 

 ing foliage, is a brown and gray carpet, almost silvery in 

 texture here and there, for dead leaves under a recently 

 melted snowdrift often seem to bear a film of gray 

 mould. The interlacing branches overhead make an 

 exquisite tracery against the sky and dapple the ground 



