pours its waters.  From the surface of this stream thin smoky wreaths of vapor rise and are changed into crystals by the frosty air.  But the waters of the spring gush forth as abundantly and musically now as they did in the hot days of last July, and the clam-shell with which you then drank is still in its place by the rock.  The pure, melodious, beautiful spring makes its own environment, regardless of surroundings.  Its sources are in the unfailing hills.  It suggests the lives of some men and women whose friendship you enjoy, and who are ever ready to refresh you on life’s way.

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The wind of last night has carried much of the snow over the top of the ridge and deposited it in this sheltered slope of the river canon.  Here are wind-formed caves of sculptured snow, vaulted with a tender blue.  Turrets and towers sparkle in the splendid light.  All angles are softened, and everywhere the lines of the snow curves are smooth and flowing.  The drift sweeps down from the footpath way on the river bank to the ice-bound bed of the river in graceful lines.  Where the side of the canon is more precipitous there is equal beauty.  Each shrub has its own peculiar type amidst the broken drift.  The red cedar, which is Iowa’s nearest approach to a pine, except in a few favored counties, hangs from the top of the crag heavily festooned with feathery snow.  Those long creeping lines on which the crystals sparkle are only brambles, and that big rosette of rusty red and fluffy white is the New Jersey tea.  Those spreading, pointed fingers of coral with a background of dazzling white are the topmost twigs of the red osier dogwood.  The strip of shrubs with graceful spray, now bowed in beauty by the river’s brink, is a group of young red birches, and this bunch of downy brown twigs, two feet above the snow, sparkling with frost particles, is the downy viburnum.  The great tangle of vine and lace work mixed with snow is young hop hornbeam, supporting honeysuckle.

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Viewed from the window of a railway train, the February fields and woods seem dead and dreary.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Every twig is lined with living buds, carefully covered with scales.  Inside those scales are leaves and blossoms deftly packed, as only Mother Nature could pack them.  Split one down the middle and examine it with your lens.  You will see the little tender leaves, and often the blossoms, ready to break out in beauty when the warm days come and flood the world with color.  Men try to photograph nature, but no photograph could do justice to the clustered buds of the red maple or the downy buds of the slippery elm.  The long green gray buds of the butternut, pistillate flowers in some, staminate flowers in others; the saffron buds of the butternut hickory; the ruby buds of the bass wood; the varnished bud scales of the sycamore and the poplar; the big gummy scales which protect the