262 LAYS OUT OF BOORS. 



have many growths that retain their chlorophyl unaltered, 

 even though subjected to actual freezing. 



I have had reference only to such tracts as could be 

 walked over in safety ; bat the same difference in a more 

 marked degree is noticeable in the low-lying wet meadows 

 which are often scarcely more than a quaking mass of 

 weeds and water, often many feet in depth. Summer 

 lingers among these tracts in direct proportion to the 

 abundance of bottom springs. I have been long familiar 

 with some forty acres of such quaking meadow, or, more 

 properly, marsh. Three years ago it was divided by a 

 gravel bank, of considerable width, that rests upon the 

 hard-pan, and prevents the commingling of the water on 

 the two sides. One half of the tract remains as it has 

 always been ; the other is permanently submerged to such 

 a depth that the characteristic vegetation of the marsh 

 has been killed. It is most instructive to walk during 

 the winter along the embankment. Summer lingers in 

 the marsh; even when the drowned meadow is firmly 

 frozen. The severest weather has little effect upon the 

 unaltered tract, and never has its " Seven Spring Comer " 

 been glazed with ice. As a consequence, animal life is 

 little affected where the warm spring water keeps the 

 meadow gi-een ; and here it is that, in the matter of their 

 habits, the many forms of animals living in this marshy 

 tract contradict the statements of those who think of win- 

 ter as reducing the active life of summer to comparative 

 inactivity, or as its actual destroyer. The destructive ef- 

 fects of severe cold hold largely good, of course, of the up- 

 land ponds, and is true, now, of the " lake," as my neighbor 

 calls his submerged meadow, but it is not applicable to the 

 unaltered marsh that adjoins it. If the startling differ- 

 ences sometimes to be seen between adjoining fields, and 

 more frequently between contiguous tracts of meadow, had 

 been more generally noticed by out-of-door students of an- 



