X

I have frequently been surprised, in late fall and early winter, to see how unequal or irregular was the encroachment of the frost upon the earth.  If there is suddenly a great fall in the mercury, the frost lays siege to the soil and effects a lodgment here and there, and extends its conquests gradually.  At one place in the field you can easily run your staff through into the soft ground, when a few rods farther on it will be as hard as a rock.  A little covering of dry grass or leaves is a great protection.  The moist places hold out long, and the spring runs never freeze.  You find the frost has gone several inches into the plowed ground, but on going to the woods, and poking away the leaves and debris under the hemlocks and cedars, you find there is no frost at all.  The Earth freezes her ears and toes and naked places first, and her body last.

If heat were visible, or if we should represent it say by smoke, then the December landscape would present a curious spectacle.  We should see the smoke lying low over the meadows, thickest in the hollows and moist places, and where the turf is oldest and densest.  It would cling to the fences and ravines.  Under every evergreen tree we should see the vapor rising and filling the branches, while the woods of pine and hemlock would be blue with it long after it had disappeared from the open country.  It would rise from the tops of the trees, and be carried this way and that with the wind.  The valleys of the great rivers, like the Hudson, would overflow with it.  Large bodies of water become regular magazines in which heat is stored during the summer, and they give it out again during the fall and early winter.  The early frosts keep well back from the Hudson, skulking behind the ridges, and hardly come over in sight at any point.  But they grow bold as the season advances, till the river’s fires, too, I are put out and Winter covers it with his snows.

XI

One of the strong and original strokes of Nature was when she made the loon.  It is always refreshing to contemplate a creature so positive and characteristic.  He is the great diver and flyer under water.  The loon is the genius loci of the wild northern lakes, as solitary as they are.  Some birds represent the majesty of nature, like the eagles; others its ferocity, like the hawks; others its cunning, like the crow; others its sweetness and melody, like the song-birds.  The loon represents its wildness and solitariness.  It is cousin to the beaver.  It has the feathers of a bird and the fur of an animal, and the heart of both.  It is as quick and cunning as it is bold and resolute.  It dives with such marvelous quickness that the shot of the gunner get there just in time “to cut across a circle of descending tail feathers and a couple of little jets of water flung upward by the web feet of the loon.”