The Bay of the Band 
he had a walking bear for Christmas. Besides, when 
you were a /z¢t/e boy you never had many blocks, and 
never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And 
how suddenly the January day goes! You hammer 
on into the deepening dusk, and the chickens go to 
roost without their supper. You would have ham- 
mered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives 
won't last very long; and you sigh as they stand 
finished. You could wish them all in pieces to do 
over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny 
smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to 
bottom board ! 
Winter! with January started, and February two 
days short! It is all a fiction. You had dreams of 
long evenings, of books and crackling fires, and of 
days shut in. It still snows; there is something 
still left of the nights, but not half enough, for the 
seed catalogues are already beginning to arrive. 
The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry 
bed and the frozen soil where the potatoes are to 
be. Yet the garden grows — on paper? No, not on 
paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a 
garden is as real in January as in June. 
And so the winter goes. For if it is not the gar- 
54 
