In the Carolinas, no doubt, the fruit trees are in bloom, and the rice land is being prepared for the seed.  In the mountains of Virginia and in Ohio they are making maple sugar; in Kentucky and Tennessee they are sowing oats; in Illinois they are, perchance, husking the corn which has remained on the stalk in the field all winter.  Wild geese and ducks are streaming across the sky from the lower Mississippi toward the great lakes, pausing awhile on the prairies, or alighting in the great cornfields, making the air resound with the noise of their wings upon the stalks and dry shucks as they resume their journey.  About this time, or a little later, in the still spring morning, the prairie hens or prairie cocks set up that low, musical cooing or crowing that defies the ear to trace or locate.  The air is filled with that soft, mysterious undertone; and, save that a bird is seen here and there flitting low over the ground, the sportsman walks for hours without coming any nearer the source of the elusivc sound.

All over a certain belt of the country the rivers and streams are roily, and chafe their banks.  There is a movement of the soils.  The capacity of the water to take up and hold in solution the salt and earths seemed never so great before.  The frost has relinquished its hold, and turned everything over to the water.  Mud is the mother now; and out of it creep the frogs, the turtles, the crawfish.

In the North how goes the season?  The winter is perchance just breaking up.  The old frost king is just striking, or preparing to strike, his tents.  The ice is going out of the rivers, and the first steamboat on the Hudson is picking its way through the blue lanes and channels.  The white gulls are making excursions up from the bay, to see what the prospects are.  In the lumber countries, along the upper Kennebec and Penobscot, and along the northern Hudson, starters are at work with their pikes and hooks starting out the pine logs on the first spring freshet.  All winter, through the deep snows, they have been hauling them to the bank of the stream, or placing them where the tide would reach them.  Now, in countless, numbers, beaten and bruised, the trunks of the noble trees come, borne by the angry flood.  The snow that furnishes the smooth bed over which they were drawn, now melted, furnishes the power that carries them down to the mills.  On the Delaware the raftsmen are at work running out their rafts.  Floating islands of logs and lumber go down the swollen stream, bending over the dams, shooting through the rapids, and bringing up at last in Philadelphia or beyond.