Another hopped into view; the female, doubtless, for both the blue and the reddish brown were less brilliant.  Every well-regulated bluebird ought to be seen in the top of a tall elm or maple; but these seemed to have no high-flying inclinations.  Maybe they could read in the clouds beneath the setting sun a prediction of the snow which came that night.  They stayed a few moments and then slowly hopped away and were lost among the tree trunks.  A further search only frightened a prairie chicken from beneath a hawthorne bush, where he had meant to pass the night; and the bluebirds were not seen again.  But the sight of bluebirds in Iowa on the nineteenth day of February is glory enough for one day.

III.  MARCH—­AND A SPRING BOUQUET

Every pilgrim to the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in sunny valleys where the tender goddess first reveals herself at Nature’s living altars.  Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she will first appear.  She delights in surprising her votaries.  Thoreau was right in saying that no man was ever alert enough to behold the first manifestation of spring.  Sometimes as we walk toward the mossy bank in the glen where the fresh green leaves of the haircap mosses were last year’s first signs of vernal verdure, the bluebird calls to us from the torch-like top of the smooth sumac and shyly tells us that, if we please, spring is here.  Sometimes we thrill with the “honk, honk” of the Canada goose and think the A-shaped band of migrants is surely this year’s messenger, crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the goddess and make her paths straight; but a little later we pass through a shadowy ravine where the white oaks have held their leaves all winter, and find that the great horned owl has already appropriated a last year’s hawk’s nest and deposited therein her two white eggs.  At the foot of the sunny hill where the spring has freely flowed all winter long, we tramp around the swamp in the vain hope of finding the purplish monk’s-hood of the skunk’s cabbage; but look up to see, instead, the many “mouse ears,” shining like bits of silvery fur, along the slender stems of the pussy willow.  Or we tramp through a hazel thicket, where the squirrels have been festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms.  We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every flower-bud spring is peeping.