82 IN WINTER. 



degrees is to go, not as an observer in the 

 true sense, but as one deaf and blind. To ram- 

 ble with this conviction, one will not misread the 

 book of nature, and so be guilty of a literary 

 crime if he gives his story to the world. 



Qtn pen tointer. 



I HAVE heard or read that one may experience 

 a sense of weariness when surrounded by the 

 best that Nature has to offer a cloying with too 

 many sweets, as it were. It seems hard to be- 

 lieve, so rejoiced is the average rambler at the 

 return of spring, but that it is true has recently 

 dawned upon me, here in the wilds of Jersey, 

 after some six weeks of merely nominal winter. 



Wherever there is a little shelter from the 

 occasional north winds, the immediate outlook is 

 suggestive of early April, but the growing daffo- 

 dils and blooming hunger-plant, dead-nettle, 

 chick-weed, spring beauties, violets, and dande- 

 lions, do not give us a spring-tide landscape, al- 

 though columbine, giant hyssop, motherwort, 

 self-heal, yellow corydalis, alum root, false mitre- 

 wort, and star of Bethlehem, are all green in the 

 sheltered nooks, and the waters of many a spring- 

 basin glow as emeralds with their wealth of aquat- 



