wound in and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful and pitiful to behold.  Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the field.  At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove—­starved at the brink of plenty.  Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I buried my vegetables.  I told Georgiana: 

“They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets out what we need.  Think of it—­a whole neighborhood of rabbits hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible leaf.”  Once that night I turned in bed, restless.  Georgiana did the same.

“Are you awake?” she said, softly.

“Are you?”

“Are you thinking about the rabbits?”

“Yes; are you?”

“What do you suppose they think about us?”

“I’d rather not know.”

Georgiana tells me that the birds in unusual numbers are wintering among the trees, driven to us with the boldness of despair.  God and nature have forgotten them; they have nothing to choose between but death and man.  She has taken my place as their almoner and nightly renders me an account of what she has done.  This winter gives her a great chance and she adorns it.  It seems that never before were so many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never mentioned between us, unconsciously she dwells upon these in her talk, and plainly favors them in her affection for the sake of the past.  There are many stories I could relate to show how simple and beautiful is this whole aspect of her nature.

A little thing happened to-night.

Towards ten o’clock she brought my hat, overcoat, overshoes, mittens, comforter.

“Put them on,” she said, mysteriously.

She also got ready, separating herself from me by so many clothes that I could almost have felt myself entitled to a divorce.

It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow.  We crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings.  When we reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids.  All that part of the ground was alive with rabbits.  Georgiana had spread for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar’s feast.  It had been done to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness.