The Strife of March 15 



snow ; despite their frailty of body, they are proof, 

 in their light torpors, against all cold. Where a 

 cloak of snow has lain for days or weeks together on 

 the wheat-fields, a network of grooved pathways is 

 sometimes laid bare on the surface of the soil, with 

 spurs branching out to left and right like the 

 channels of some system of irrigation. Secure be- 

 neath the snow that sheeted the field, the mole has 

 been able to drive his hunting-paths along the level 

 of the soil, instead of in his usual concealment 

 beneath it ; and his quest for food at this level shows 

 how the earth is kept free by a snowfall from the 

 binding action of long frost. Unless he drives 

 such galleries in vain, not only the hunter but the 

 worms on which he preys must move freely at the 

 surface of the soil. 



As the west wind wakes the landscape to active 

 life, the song of the birds, withheld through the weeks 

 of frost, bursts forth in simultaneous chorus. In 

 the hardest weather of late winter, as well as in its 

 most dismal hours of cold and rain, the most per- 

 sistent singer is often the hedge-sparrow, which 

 develops at this time of year a pugnacity and 

 insistence curiously in contrast with its normal 

 quietness. But while, in a whitened landscape, the 

 hedge-sparrow reels out its thin music from the 

 naked hedgerow, it seems only to emphasize the 

 absence of the other singers of early spring. When 

 spring has been long delayed their songs break out, 

 on a day of west wind and sun, with a suddenness 

 of unanimous acclamation which is rare on English 

 soil. The spring of our Atlantic climate comes to 



