APRIL DAYS 



gray trees, soon to come to the end of 

 his life, brief at its longest, drowned in 

 the seductive sweets of a sap bucket. 



The squirrels are chattering over the 

 wine of the maple branches they have 

 broached, in merrier mood than the 

 hare, who limps over the matted leaves 

 in the raggedness of shifting raiment, 

 fitting himself to a new inconspicuous- 

 ness. 



We shall not find it unpleasant nor 

 unprofitable to take to the woods now, 

 for we may be sure that they are pleas- 

 anter than the untidy fields. Where 

 nature has her own way with herself, she 

 makes her garb seemly even now, after 

 all the tousling and rents she gave it in 

 her angry winter moods. The scraps of 

 moss, bark, and twigs with which the 

 last surface of the snow was obtrusively 

 littered lie now unnoticed on the flat- 

 pressed leaves, an umber carpet dotted 

 here with flecks of moss, there sprigged 

 with fronds of evergreen fern, purple 

 leaves of squirrelcups, with their downy 

 buds and first blossoms. Between banks 

 so clad the brook babbles as joyously as 

 amid all the bloom and leafage of June, 

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