62 



WINTER 



elms. A chickadee ! He caught for an instant on a 

 dead stub of a limb that stuck out over the road, 



scrambled along to its 

 broken tip, and whisked 

 into a hole that ran 

 straight down the cen- 

 tre of the old stub, 

 down, for I don't know 

 how far. 



I stopped. The limb 

 lay out upon the wind, 

 with only an eddy of 

 the gale sucking at the 

 little round hole in the 

 broken end, while some- 

 where far down in its 

 hollow heart, huddling himself into a downy, dozy 

 ball for the night, had crept the chickadee. I knew 

 by the very way he struck the limb and by the way 

 he turned in at the hole that he had been there 

 before. He knew whither, across the sweeping mead- 

 ows, he was being blown. He had even helped the 

 winds as they whirled him, for, having tarried along 

 the roads until late, he was in a great hurry to get 

 home. But he was safe for the night now, in the very 

 bed, it may be, where he was hatched last summer, 

 and where at this moment, who knows, were crowded 

 half a dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last 

 summer's brood, unharmed still, and still sharing the 



