But all this is digression.  The best time to begin keeping that New Year’s nature resolution is now, when the oaks are seen in all their rugged majesty, when the elms display their lofty, graceful, vase-like forms, and when every other tree of the forest exhibits its peculiar beauty of trunk, and branch, and twig.  Often January is a most propitious month for the tenderfoot nature-lover.  Such was the year which has just passed.  During the first part of the month the weather was almost springlike; so bright and balmy that a robin was seen in an apple-tree, and the brilliant plumage of the cardinal was observed in this latitude.  Green leaves, such as wild geranium, strawberry and speedwell, were to be found in abundance beneath their covering of fallen forest leaves.  Scouring rushes vied with evergreen ferns in arresting the attention of the rambler.  In one sheltered spot a clump of catnip was found, fresh, green, and aromatic, as if it were July instead of January.

Sunday, the sixth, was a day of rare beauty and enticement.  Well might the recording angel forgive the nature lover who forgot the promises made for him by his sponsors that he should “hear sermons,” and who fared forth into the woods instead, first reciting “The groves were God’s first temples,” and then softly singing, “When God invites, how blest the day!”

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They err who think the winter woods void of life and color.  Pause for a moment on the broad open flood-plain of the river, the winter fields and meadows stretching away in gentle slopes on either side.  There are but few trees, but they have had room for full development and are noble specimens.  All is gaiety.  A blue-jay screams from a broad-topped white ash which is so full of winged seeds that it looks like a mass of foliage.  The sable-robed king of the winter woods, the American crow, in the full vigor of his three-score years, maybe, (he lives to be a hundred) caws lustily from the bare white branches of a big sycamore, that queer anomaly of the forest which disrobes itself for the winter.  The merry chickadees divide their time between the rustling, ragged bark of the red birches and the withered heads of heath-aster and blue vervain below.  In the one they get the meat portion of their midday meal, and in the other the cereal foods.  No wonder they are sleek and joyous.

A few steps farther and we leave this broad alluvial bottom to enter the canon through which the river, ages ago, began to cut its course.  These ridges of limestone, loess and drift rise a hundred feet or more above the level of the plain from which the river suddenly turns aside.  They are thickly covered with timber.  There is no angel with a flaming sword to keep you from passing into this winter paradise!  The river bank is lined with pussy willows; they gleam in the sunshine like copper.  Farther back there are different varieties of dogwood, some with delicate