A Window in Arcady 
March 15. —Spring arrived and went into hiding in 
the river meadows a couple of week ago, and all the dis¬ 
agreeable weather that followed hard upon her coming 
was not able entirely to keep her presence a secret. The 
willows ever since have been full of it, every bare twig 
of them aglow and beaming with the radiance caught 
from her, and they stand out in the landscape with crowns 
enveloped in aureoles of dreamy, yellow light—spectacles 
of rare and delicate beauty. The robins, too, soon got an 
inkling of her being about, and from their perches on the 
fence or on the stays that support the telegraph poles, the 
red-vested fellows have for some days been knowingly 
eyeing every passer-by, as though they could tell him a 
thing or two if they chose. But the song sparrows—bless 
their melodious little throats!—cannot keep a secret at 
all, and they have been blurting out the whole story for 
a week, carolling from every water-side bush for all the 
world to hear: “Sweet-sweet-sweet, sweet o’ the year is 
near,” and so the news got out. 
The willows of the river meadows are not the stock that 
yield those precious posies of March, the pussy willows. 
These gray, silken-haired catkins that we all like to look 
at and stroke, and to buy in the market-place, are gotten 
usually from the goat willow of cultivated grounds, or 
from two or three species of wild willow shrubs found 
about swamps or along creeks, or sometimes at the edges of 
woods in the hills. The pussy, by the way, is rather 
skeptical of early March promises, and does not come out 
all at once, but after unbolting its door and emerging 
part way from its winter house on the twig, it likes to bide 
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