green twigs and some a cherry red.  The wild rose and the raspberry vines add their glossy purplish and cherry red stems to the color combination, and a contrast is afforded by the silvery gray bark of stray aspens.  A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet’s nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple.  On all of these the sunlight plays and makes a wondrous color symphony.  “Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.”  To be sure, this colorful arrangement of the stems and twigs is not brilliant, like the flaming vermilion blossoms of the Lobelia cardinalis in August, the orange yellow of the rudbeckias in September, or the wondrous blue of the fringed gentian in early October.  It is more like the delicate tints and shadings of an arts and crafts exhibition, stained leather, hammered copper and brass, art canvas, and ancient illuminated initials in monks’ missals.  The tempered winter sunlight is further softened by the trees; as it illuminates the soft red rags of the happy old birch it seems sublimated, almost sanctified and spiritual, like that which filters through rich windows in cathedrals, and makes a real halo around the heads of sweet-faced saints.

* * * * *

There are strange sounds for January.  All the winter birds are doing their share in the chorus and orchestra; crows, jays, woodpeckers, nut-hatches, juncos, tree-sparrows.  But suddenly a woodpecker begins a new sound,—­his vernal drumming!  Not the mere tap, tap, tap, in quest of insects, but the love-call drumming of the nidification season, nearly three months ahead of time.

Swollen by recent rains, the river is two feet higher than usual.  There is a sheet of ice on either shore, but the water swiftly flows down the narrow channel in the middle with a sound halfway between a gurgle and a roar, mingled anon with the sound of grinding cakes of ice.  Suddenly away up at the bend of the river there is a sharp crack, like the discharge of a volley of musketry.  Swiftly it comes down the ice, passes your feet with a distinct tremor, and your eyes follow the sound down the river until the two walls of the canon meet in the perspective.  In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an approaching seismic shock.  Only there was no terror in this.  It was the laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of “the elfin builders of the frost.”

The recent rains have vivified the mosses clinging to the gray rocks which jut out, halfway up the slope.  Very tender and beautiful is their vivid shade of green.  Winter and summer, the mosses are always with us.  When the last late aster has faded, the last blue blossom of the gentian changed to brown, the green mosses still remain.  And the more they are studied, the more fascinating they become.  Take some home and examine them with a hand lens,