DECEMBER. 297 



Leaving this brilliant winter garden, I passed down 

 the road, and where the slope was higher and equally ex- 

 posed to every breath of the north wind, I found the ferns 

 still green. This excites no surprise at favored spots on 

 the home hill-side, where the sun looks doVn at noon and 

 every breeze but that from the south is held at bay. But 

 here on the road-side every condition is reversed, and 

 where one would naturally look for the earliest effects of 

 frost none are to be found. This can be explained in part 

 by recalling the conditions holding good in summer. 

 Having a northern exposure, it lost none of its moisture 

 through exposure to the direct sunlight, and while plant 

 life on the opposite side of the road was withered and sere 

 throughout the dry weeks of August and September, here 

 it was fresh and green as in early June. There was no 

 check to its growth from early spring until late autumn, 

 and so it had vigor enough to withstand the ordeal of a 

 winter's cold. This is the apparent reason, but, alas ! 

 apparent reasons are not always the correct ones. 



Climbing to the top of the bank, the snow-clad field 

 is again before me, and with a feeling akin to dread I 

 start across it. The bright sunshine is blinding ; the fit- 

 ful breeze is all too keen for comfort ; but even here there 

 is plant life that bids both the wind and snow defiance. 

 Trailing Mitchella, laden with crimson berries, brightens 

 the little circle of sod ^eneath a lone cedar, where no 

 plow appears ever to have invaded. A bit of mossy, gray- 

 green sod there has as aged a look as the old tree itself, 

 and this we know has weathered the storms of two centuries 

 — an all-suggestive bit of sod, upon which one might fancy 

 still remained the imprint of an Indian moccasin ; a bit 

 of sod that should have been studded with arrowheads, 

 and here, indeed, I found a fragment of one. With the 

 whole world laid bare in midsummer, what matters a 

 mere speck of weedy ground ? Nothing then, perhaps — 



