the summit; the snow partly supports us, but when it gives way and we sound it with our legs, we find it up to our hips.  Here we enter a white world indeed.  It is like some conjurer’s trick.  The very trees have turned to snow.  The smallest branch is like a cluster of great white antlers.  The eye is bewildered by the soft fleecy labyrinth before it.  On the lower ranges the forests were entirely bare, but now we perceive the summit of every mountain about us runs up into a kind of arctic region where the trees are loaded with snow.  The beginning of this colder zone is sharply marked all around the horizon; the line runs as level as the shore line of a lake or sea; indeed, a warmer aerial sea fills all the valleys, sub-merging the lower peaks, and making white islands of all the higher ones.  The branches bend with the rime.  The winds have not shaken it down.  It adheres to them like a growth.  On examination I find the branches coated with ice, from which shoot slender spikes and needles that penetrate and hold the cord of snow.  It is a new kind of foliage wrought by the frost and the clouds, and it obscures the sky, and fills the vistas of the woods nearly as much as the myriad leaves of summer.  The sun blazes, the sky is without a cloud or a film, yet we walk in a soft white shade.  A gentle breeze was blowing on the open crest of the mountain, but one could carry a lighted candle through these snow-curtained and snow-canopied chambers.  How shall we see the fox if the hound drives him through this white obscurity?  But we listen in vain for the voice of the dog and press on.  Hares’ tracks were numerous.  Their great soft pads had left their imprint everywhere, sometimes showing a clear leap of ten feet.  They had regular circuits which we crossed at intervals.  The woods were well suited to them, low and dense, and, as we saw, liable at times to wear a livery whiter than their own.

The mice, too, how thick their tracks were, that of the white-footed mouse being most abundant; but occasionally there was a much finer track, with strides or leaps scarcely more than an inch apart.  This is perhaps the little shrew-mouse of the woods, the body not more than an inch and a half long, the smallest mole or mouse kind known to me.  Once, while encamping in the woods, one of these tiny shrews got into an empty pail standing in camp, and died before morning, either from the cold, or in despair of ever getting out of the pail.

At one point, around a small sugar maple, the mice-tracks are unusually thick.  It is doubtless their granary; they have beech-nuts stored there, I’ll warrant.  There are two entrances to the cavity of the tree,—­one at the base, and one seven or eight feet up.  At the upper one, which is only just the size of a mouse, a squirrel has been trying to break in.  He has cut and chiseled the solid wood to the depth of nearly an inch, and his chips strew the snow all about.  He knows what is in there, and the mice know that he