The Lay of the Band 
numbing here with a power for death that the ther- 
mometer could not mark. I backed into the wind 
and hastened on toward the double line of elms that 
arched the road in front of the house. Already I 
could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass, 
It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for 
what could live in this long darkness and fearful cold? 
Could live? The question was hardly thought, 
when an answer was whirled past me into the near- 
est of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for 
an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled 
along to its broken tip, and whisked over into a hole 
that ran straight down the centre of the stub, down, 
for I don’t know how far. 
I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only 
an eddy of the gale sucking at the little round hole in 
the broken end, while far down in its hollow heart, 
huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the night, 
was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck 
the limb and turned in that he had been there before. 
He knew whither, across the sweeping meadows, he 
was being blown. He had even helped the winds as 
they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads 
till late. But he was safe for the night now, in the 
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