The Lay of the Band 
no doubt, before there is plenty again ; there will be 
suffering and death. But what with the migrating, 
the strange deep sleeping, the building and harvest- 
ing, there will be also much comfortable, much joy- 
ous and sociable living. 
Long before the muskrats began to build, even be- 
fore the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks 
started their winter stores. I don’t know which be- 
gan his work first, which kept harder at it, chipmunk 
or the provident ant. The ant has come by a reputa- 
tion for thrift, which, though entirely deserved, is 
still not the exceptional virtue it is made to seem. 
Chipmunk is just as thrifty. So is the busy bee. It 
is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the 
bee busy far beyond her summer needs. Much of 
her labor is entirely for the winter. By the first of 
August she has filled the brood chamber with honey 
—forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees 
and for the whole colony until the willows tassel 
again. But who knows what the winter may be? 
How cold and long drawn out into the coming May? 
So the harvesting is pushed with vigor on to the 
flowering of the last autumn asters—on until fifty, a 
hundred, or even three hundred pounds of surplus 
Io 
