JANUARY DAYS 



prints of a grouse, and you wonder why 

 he, so strong of wing, should choose to 

 wade laboriously the clogging snow even 

 in his briefest trip, rather than make 

 his easy way through the unresisting 

 air, and the snow-written record of his 

 wayward wanderings tells not why. 

 Suddenly, as if a mine had been sprung 

 where your next footstep should fall and 

 with almost as startling, though harm- 

 less effect, another of his wild tribe 

 bursts upward through the unmarked 

 white floor and goes whirring and clat- 

 tering away, scattering in powdery ruin 

 the maze of delicate tracery the snow- 

 fall wrought ; and vanishes, leaving only 

 an aerial pathway of naked twigs to mark 

 his impetuous passage. 



In the twilight of an evergreen thicket 

 sits a great horned owl like a hermit in 

 his cell in pious contemplation of his 

 own holiness and the world's wicked- 

 ness. But this recluse hates not sin, 

 only daylight and mankind. Out in the 

 fields you may find the white-robed bro- 

 ther of this gray friar, a pilgrim from 

 the far north, brooding in the very face 

 of the sun, on some stack or outlying 

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