EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 313 
swiftly spreading along it, making a dark blue 
ripple. ’Now four or five windy bolts, sharp 
or blunt, strike it at once and spread different 
ways. The boisterous but playful north wind 
evidently stoops from a considerable height to 
dally with this fair pool which it discerns be¬ 
neath. You could sit there and watch these 
blue shadows playing over the surface like 
light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. 
It reminds me, too, of swift Camilla on a field 
of grain. The wind often touches the water 
only by the finest points or edges. It is thus 
when you look in some measure from the sun, 
but if you move round so as to come more 
nearly opposite to him, then these dark blue 
ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for 
now you see the sides of the wavelets which re¬ 
flect the sun to you.Watching the rip¬ 
ples fall and dart across the surface of low lying 
and small woodland lakes is one of the amuse¬ 
ments of these windy March and April days. 
It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows 
in the w r oods that you can see or study them 
these days, for the winds sweep over the whole 
breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they 
only touch these sheltered lakelets by fine 
points and edges from time to time. 
And then there is such a fiddling in the 
woods, such a viol creaking of bough on bough 
