almost microscopic in its smallness, growing along graveled walks and in old plowed fields in February.  The liverwort sometimes comes out as early as the first week in March, and the little frogs begin to pipe doubtfully about the same time.  Apricot-trees are usually in bloom on All-Fool’s Day and the apple-trees on May Day.  By August, mother hen will lead forth her third brood, and I had a March pullet that came off with a family of her own in September.  Our calendar is made for this climate.  March is a spring month.  One is quite sure to see some marked and striking change during the first eight or ten days.  This season (1868) is a backward one, and the memorable change did not come till the 10th.

Then the sun rose up from a bed of vapors, and seemed fairly to dissolve with tenderness and warmth.  For an hour or two the air was perfectly motionless, and full of low, humming, awakening sounds.  The naked trees had a rapt, expectant look.  From some unreclaimed common near by came the first strain of the song sparrow; so homely, because so old and familiar, yet so inexpressibly pleasing.  Presently a full chorus of voices arose, tender, musical, half suppressed, but full of genuine hilarity and joy.  The bluebird warbled, the robin called, the snowbird chattered, the meadowlark uttered her strong but tender note.  Over a deserted field a turkey buzzard hovered low, and alighted on a stake in the fence, standing a moment with outstretched, vibrating wings till he was sure of his hold.  A soft, warm, brooding day.  Roads becoming dry in many places, and looking so good after the mud and the snow.  I walk up beyond the boundary and over Meridian Hill.  To move along the drying road and feel the delicious warmth is enough.  The cattle low long and loud, and look wistfully into the distance.  I sympathize with them.  Never a spring comes but I have an almost irresistible desire to depart.  Some nomadic or migrating instinct or reminiscence stirs within me.  I ache to be off.

As I pass along, the high-bole calls in the distance precisely as I have heard him in the North.  After a pause he repeats his summons.  What can be more welcome to the ear than these early first sounds!  They have such a margin of silence!

One need but pass the boundary of Washington city to be fairly in the country, and ten minutes’ walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods.  The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places crosses it.

The woods, which I soon reach, are stark and still.  The signs of returning life are so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but there is a fresh, earthy smell in the air, as if something had stirred here under the leaves.  The crows caw above the wood, or walk about the brown fields.  I look at the gray silent trees long and long, but they show no sign.  The catkins of some alders by a little pool