WINTER VISITORS. 
285 
in the swamps ten feet from the ground, as it appeared 
the next spring. 
In the deepest snows, the path which I used from 
the highway to my house, about half a mile long, might 
have been represented by a meandering dotted line, 
with wide intervals between the dots. For a week of 
even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, 
and of the same length, coming and going, stepping de¬ 
liberately and with the precision of a pair of dividers in 
my own deep tracks, —- to such routine the winter re¬ 
duces us, — yet often they were filled with heaven’s 
own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my 
walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently 
tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to 
keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow- 
birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines; when 
the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so 
sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir- 
trees ; wading to the tops of the highest hills when the 
snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking 
down another snow-storm on my head at every step ; 
or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my 
hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter 
quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by watching 
a barred owl (Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the 
lower dead limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, in 
broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He 
could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow 
with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I 
made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect 
his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids 
soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slum¬ 
berous influence after watching him half an hour, as he 
