Page:The Way of the Wild (1923).pdf/291

 the new snow. It is as soft and white as wool, and as clean as Mother Nature can make it. Then all the dead weeds and grasses along the roadside take on new beauty. The pines and the evergreens are festooned with great white plumes, and even the elm twig, as Lowell says, is ridged with pearl.

What a pleasure it is then to take a long tramp in the deep woods and behold this beauty and loveliness. We will find an army of chickadees at work in the woods. They are all busy hunting and eating the aphis, or bark louse, and they do a great deal of good.

The trees look quite different from what they did in the summer when we threaded the forest, but the promise of life is still there.

They are even growing in the winter-time, although we do not think so. Under the old bark the new bark is forming and all the wonderful processes of nature are going on just as though it was summer-time, only more slowly. Even before the dead leaves fell the new leaf buds were forming at the base of the old leaf