Chickadee 
which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not 
sing a while in June and then fly away and leave us. 
He stays the year around; heis constant and faithful 
in his friendship, though I sometimes forget. 
He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could 
have only one of the birds? As it is, I get along for 
more than half the year without bobolink, but what 
would my out-of-doors be without chickadee? There 
is not a single day in the year that I cannot find him, 
no matter how hot, or cold, how hard it rains or snows. 
Often he is the only voice in all the silent woods, the 
only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter world. 
I was crunching along through the January dusk 
toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved 
partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered 
off among the naked bushes,—- a moment of sound, a 
bit of life vanishing in the winter night of the woods. 
I knew the very hemlock in which he would roost ; 
but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of his 
“hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in 
such a night as this?—this vast of sweeping winds 
and frozen snow! 
The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, 
where the winds were free. The cold was driving, 
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