DECEMBER. 303 



have tarried here until the close of day. It is strange, 

 though, that mere mechanical activity should be so fasci- 

 nating. . I have sat for hours by a meadow brook at home, 

 seeing nothing but the rippling waters, oblivious even to 

 the mosquito's ominous hum. Here, at the mill-pond, 

 are forever the same immovable rocks, and the waters that 

 lash them sing forever the same song. It matters little, 

 whether we come in June or December, a bit whiter or 

 greener as the case may be, yet we stand and gaze by the 

 hour, and, lulled by the rushing waters, are often lost in 

 thought. But there are torrents of ever rushing life of 

 far mightier import than mere troubled waters, and why, 

 it may well be asked, do they so seldom attract us? 

 Though cold and forbidding the day, as I clambered, 

 almost helplessly, down what my companion called the 

 " steps," I found in a crevice of the mist-dampened 

 rocks a small black spider that resisted all my efforts 

 to entrap him. Think of the current of his thoughts 

 as they rushed through his brain ! for spiders, be they 

 great or small, are as actively intelligent as any ant or 

 bee. 



Doubtless, until within a few weeks the icy waters 

 have sheltered madcap life as impetuous in its way as the 

 plunging currents that encompassed it, but it- were in vain 

 to seek for it at such a time as this. No fishes flash in 

 the shallows now ; no salamanders lurk beneath the flat 

 stones, and beyond, down the stream, where hardy weeds 

 have worked their way through the crowded rocks, no 

 overbrave frog lingers to contemplate the round of the 

 seasons. All have fled to hidden quarters beyond the reach 

 of some forbidding feature of the winter here, but what 

 that feature is, who knows ? I can now, far better than 

 heretofore, realize how many are the differences between 

 localities but three or four hundred miles apart, and how 

 widely the same creatures vary in habit, whether in Massa- 



