The Winier Woods. 
It is a perfectly beautiful morning. Frost 
is glinting and glistening on fence and stone, 
and the haze makes gauzy purple sunshine. The 
air is so still that a dry leaf rattling down from 
branch to branch in the patch work buttonball 
tree can be heard clear across the lot. 
Cold, dark water pouring and spilling along 
among the gray rocks in the stream looks ever 
so much more mysterious than it does in the 
summer time, and it makes a louder echo among 
the big trees than it does when masses of leaves 
smother the sound. 
How straight and prim the sentinel cedars stand 
in a sea of old gold blue-bent grass on the slope 
of the hill where our ancestors planted hopes 
and potatoes away back in revolutionary days. 
I am fond of this particular grass in winter. 
With its polished golden bents and little feathery 
tops it seems to catch the pale sunshine and 
then to give it out slowly again with a mellow 
glow, just as rocks radiate the heat which they 
gathered during the noon hours of plenty. 
Though I am knee deep in the blue-bent grass 
it seems to move aside for me. I leave no more 
impression than if wading in the trout stream. 
It is different from the summer grasses which 
leave a sort of dismayed tangle wherever I step, 
and which one day attracted the notice of the 
farmer who, wishing to be polite and to avoid 
personalities, said: “We have to keep the hogs 
out of that meadow until it is mowed.” 
The hemlocks are wonderful in their clean 
green which stands out against the burly oaks 
whose arms are bared for the winter contest. 
Some morning there may be a sprinkling of 
snow in the hemlock tops, but it will only make 
them more beautiful, like the whitening hair 
of the matron whose kindly face loses nothing 
by the passing of its summer. 
The leaves of this sprightly young white pine 
are much brighter than they were in July. I 
am positive of that and it is more than contrast. 
The needles have a lovely blue-green gloss, just 
as the fur of the mink brightens when cold 
weather comes. In the pine tree now there is 
a kind of living light that changes with each 
shift of my position, like the iris on the necks 
of the doves at the barn. Surely this is the 
hour of triumph of the evergreens. 
What splendid masses of darker green the 
1 laurels make on the other side of the old tumble- 
I down stone wall at the edge of the woods! All 
I summer long they hide away without trying to 
j compete with the rampant verdure overhead, 
I but now they step right out and bow to the 
I brown landscape, which welcomes their coming. 
What a cheer they bring, especially if the red 
winter berry is with them. 
Rustling loudly among the dry leaves by 
the fence is a splendid gray squirrel holding 
his wide tail coquettishly while he is rustling 
for nuts. Soon he sees me, and after a brief 
scrutiny he is gone. 
, The wind has blown almost every one of the 
dead leaves away from this damp slope in the 
woods and the veined light green leaves of rat¬ 
tlesnake plantains deck the bare ground. It is 
a pretty plant and the tender leaves will keep 
beautifully green all winter. If I take home 
one or two of the rattlesnake plantains and put 
them in a glass jar with some living moss about 
their roots and cover the top of the jar tightly 
they will smile at me gratefully until spring. 
Winter is the time of glory of a great many 
of the mosses and ferns, but I do not know 
r .i 
SENTINEL CEDARS IN A SEA OF OLD GOLD. 
W ho would exchange white birches for trees that are 
good for something? 
their names. Nobody has loved them enough 
to give them pet names, and scientific names are 
hard to remember. One of the glossiest of all 
of the green winter things is the pipsissewa, and 
I know where the spotted form of the pipsissewa 
grows under some old cedar trees on top of a 
cliff. Princess pine leads a crooked chase with 
its green banners when it says, “Follow the 
leader,” but I am going to play for a minute 
with this one. 
Who would exchange this graceful clump of 
white birches for “trees that are good for some¬ 
thing?” I would not; not for one single minute. 
They love poor soil and have just as good a 
mission to carry out as the charitable people 
who devote themselves to going into the slums 
to carry sweetness and good deeds among the 
poverty stricken. The chickadees are at work 
among the white birches, a whole animated 
troop of them. I call softly “Chickadee, chicka¬ 
dee.” Dear tiny fluffy chickadees, you are com¬ 
ing right around your old friend, arn’t you? 
Where is cousin nuthatch who usually goes 
about with you to show that family relation¬ 
ships are friendly? See that pert head with 
bright beady eyes turned to one side trying to 
make out if I am some dire monster, or only 
a chum. What a cheer you cunning birds bring 
to the winter woods. No matter how cold it 
is or how the snow sifts through the branches, 
or how sharp-edged the wind, it is “chickadee, 
chickadee” all day long as merrily and confid¬ 
ingly as when the spring buds are bursting with 
new sap. 
As I go on. right out from under my feet 
jumps a rabbit running fast until he stops where 
the brown leaves of a young red oak hang over 
a stone. How does he know that the color 
will so closely match his fur and give pro¬ 
tection ? Is it instinct or reason ? As I ap¬ 
proach him slowly the satiny ears are laid down 
close and the whole position is one of hiding. 
Then one ear goes up a little and he turns his 
head enough to get me into the corner of one 
of those big dark eyes. 
Here in the moist ground is the fresh track 
of a deer. I know it is fresh, because the fern 
leaf in the track has not had time to straighten 
up. It is a big deer, for whoever saw the track 
of any other size of deer? I wonder if he is 
watching me from some safe place. There, 
when I say something, up fly two black ducks 
with great splashing and quacking. They must 
have taken me for the deer or they would 
never in the world have let me get so close. 
In the sand a_t the edge of the water there are 
some muskrat tracks and I should like to sit 
down and watch for one of the chubby owners 
to come out of his hole in the bank, but they 
keep very still as a rule until time f’or the lamps 
to be lighted down at the farmhouse. 
Cornelia Andrews Briggs. 
Mallards Winter in Alaska. 
A good many years ago some sportsmen were 
startled by the statement made by Col. W. D. 
Pickett, then residing in the high mountains of 
Wyoming, that mallard ducks and even Wilson’s 
snipe wintered regularly in the mountains there, 
about certain warm springs or open water, where 
they could feed all through the winter. Some 
years afterward Thomas Elwood Hofer an¬ 
nounced that many ducks spent the winter in 
the rough and always open waters of the Yellow¬ 
stone River rapids. 
In the January number of the Auk. Chas. 
Sheldon, who spent the winter of 1907-1908 on 
the head of the Middle Fork of Toklak River, 
Alaska, at the north base of Mt. McKinley, in 
