initial commit of ebook 18174HEADmain

1 files changed, 1871 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/18174.txt b/18174.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bccb9ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18174.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1871 @@
+Project Gutenberg's Some Winter Days in Iowa, by Frederick John Lazell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Some Winter Days in Iowa
+
+Author: Frederick John Lazell
+
+Release Date: April 14, 2006 [EBook #18174]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME WINTER DAYS IN IOWA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Sogard, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Some Winter Days in Iowa
+
+
+  BY
+
+  Frederick John Lazell
+
+
+
+
+  CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
+  THE TORCH PRESS
+  NINETEEN HUNDRED SEVEN
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1907
+  BY
+  FRED J. LAZELL.
+
+
+  1907
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+I am glad to have the privilege, thus in advance, of looking over Mr.
+Lazell's delightful essays. He has surely a gift in this sort of
+thing. We are grateful to the man who shows us what he sees in Nature,
+but more to the man who like our present author shows us how easy and
+blessed it is to see for ourselves.
+
+Mr. Lazell reminds me of Thoreau and Emerson, and I can suggest no
+better foreword than the passage from the last named author, from the
+_Method of Nature_, as follows:
+
+"Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us with intent
+to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse and is really songs of praise.
+What difference can it make whether it take the shape of exhortation,
+or of passionate exclamation, or of scientific statement? These are
+forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the fact that God has
+done thus or thus."
+
+                                        THOMAS H. MACBRIDE
+
+IOWA CITY, IOWA
+     OCTOBER 17, 1907
+
+
+
+
+I. THE WOODLANDS IN JANUARY
+
+
+Humanity has always turned to nature for relief from toil and strife.
+This was true of the old world; it is much more true of the new,
+especially in recent years. There is a growing interest in wild things
+and wild places. The benedicite of the Druid woods, always appreciated
+by the few, like Lowell, is coming to be understood by the many. There
+is an increasing desire to get away from the roar and rattle of the
+streets, away from even the prim formality of suburban avenues and
+artificial bits of landscape gardening into the panorama of woodland,
+field, and stream. Men with means are disposing of their palatial
+residences in the cities and moving to real homes in the country,
+where they can see the sunrise and the death of day, hear the rhythm
+of the rain and the murmur of the wind, and watch the unfolding of the
+first flowers of spring. Cities are purchasing large parks where the
+beauties of nature are merely accentuated, not marred. States and the
+nation are setting aside big tracts of wilderness where rock and rill,
+waterfall and canon, mountain and marsh, shell-strewn beach and
+starry-blossomed brae, flowerful islets and wondrous wooded hills
+welcome the populace, soothe tired nerves and mend the mind and the
+morals. These are encouraging signs of the times. At last we are
+beginning to understand, with Emerson, that he who knows what sweets
+and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens,
+and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. It
+is as if some new prophet had arisen in the land, crying, "Ho, every
+one that is worn and weary, come ye to the woodlands; and he that hath
+no money let him feast upon those things which are really rich and
+abiding." While we are making New Year resolves let us resolve to
+spend less time with shams, more with realities; less with dogma, more
+with sermons in stones; less with erotic novels and baneful journals,
+more with the books in the running brooks; listening less readily to
+gossip and malice, more willingly to the tongues in trees; spending
+more pleasureful hours with the music of bird and breeze, rippling
+rivers, and laughing leaves; less time with cues and cards and colored
+comics, more with cloud and star, fish and field, and forest. "The
+cares that infest the day" shall fall like the burden from Christian's
+back as we watch the fleecy clouds or the silver stars mirrored in the
+waveless waters. We shall call the constellations by their names and
+become on speaking terms with the luring voices of the forest
+fairyland. We shall "thrill with the resurrection called spring," and
+steep our senses in the fragrance of its flowers; glory in the gushing
+life of summer, sigh at the sweet sorrows of autumn, and wax virile in
+winter's strength of storm and snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We shall begin our pilgrimages lacking in Nature's lore, many of us,
+as were four men who recently walked down a city street and looked at
+the trees which lined the way. One confessed ignorance as to their
+identity; another thought he knew but couldn't remember; a third said
+they looked like maples; and a fourth thought that silence, like
+honesty, as the copybooks used to tell us, was the best policy. And
+yet the name linden was writ large on those trees,--on the beautiful
+gray bark, the alternate method of twig arrangement, the fat red
+winter buds, which shone in the sunshine like rubies, and especially
+on the little cymes of pendulous, pea-like fruit, each cyme attached
+to its membranaceous bract or wing. Of course, if the pedestrians had
+been in the midst of rich woods and there found a trunk of great girth
+and rough bark, surrounded by several handsome young stems with
+close-fitting coats, the group looking for all the world like a
+comfortable old mother with a family of fresh-faced, willowy,
+marriageable daughters, every member of the quartet would have
+chorused, bass-wood.
+
+But no one need be ashamed to confess an ignorance of botany.
+Botanical ignorance is more common than poverty. It has always been
+prevalent. And the cause of it may be traced back to the author of all
+our short-comings, old Adam. We read that every beast of the field and
+every fowl of the air were brought to Adam to see what he would call
+them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
+name thereof. But why, oh why, didn't he name the trees? If he had
+known enough of the science to partake of the fruit of the tree of
+life he might have lived long enough to write a systematic botany,
+satisfactory alike to the Harvard school of standpat systematists and
+their manual-ripping rivals in nomenclature. But he didn't; and no one
+else may ever hope to do it.
+
+Eve had never read a book on how to know the wild fruits, and her
+first field work in botany had a disastrous termination; it
+complicated the subject by the punishment of thorns and thistles.
+Cain's conduct brought both botany and agriculture into disrepute.
+Little more is heard until Pharaoh's daughter went botanizing and
+found Moses in the bulrushes. Oshea and Jehoshua showed some
+advancement by bringing back grapes and figs and pomegranates from the
+brook Eschol as the proudest products of the promised land. But
+Solomon was the only man in the olden times who ever knew botany
+thoroughly. We are told that he was wiser than all men. "Prove it,"
+says some doubting reader, moving for a more specific statement. So
+the biographer adds: "He spake of trees, from the cedar that is in
+Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall."
+
+Four centuries later, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
+anticipated Emerson's advice about eating bread and pulse at rich
+men's tables. The historian tells us that they were men skilful in all
+wisdom, cunning in knowledge, and understanding science. Possessing
+such wisdom, Daniel knew it would be easy to mix up the wicked elders
+who plotted against the virtue of the fair Susanna by asking them a
+question of botany. One said he saw her under a mastick tree and the
+other under a holm tree. This gave Shakespeare that fine line in _The
+Merchant of Venice_, "A Daniel come to judgment; yea, a Daniel." But
+in these latter days we rarely read the story of Susanna, and
+Shakespeare's line is not understood by one play-goer in fifty.
+
+When the diminutive Zaccheus climbed into a shade tree which graced a
+town lot in Jericho he gave the translators for "the Most High and
+Mighty Prince James" another puzzle, for they put him on record as
+going up into a sycamore tree. We had always supposed that this was
+because the sycamore's habit of shedding its bark made smooth climbing
+for Zaccheus. But scientific commentators tell us now that it was not
+a sycamore tree, but a hybridized fig-mulberry!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But all this is digression. The best time to begin keeping that New
+Year's nature resolution is now, when the oaks are seen in all their
+rugged majesty, when the elms display their lofty, graceful, vase-like
+forms, and when every other tree of the forest exhibits its peculiar
+beauty of trunk, and branch, and twig. Often January is a most
+propitious month for the tenderfoot nature-lover. Such was the year
+which has just passed. During the first part of the month the weather
+was almost springlike; so bright and balmy that a robin was seen in an
+apple-tree, and the brilliant plumage of the cardinal was observed in
+this latitude. Green leaves, such as wild geranium, strawberry and
+speedwell, were to be found in abundance beneath their covering of
+fallen forest leaves. Scouring rushes vied with evergreen ferns in
+arresting the attention of the rambler. In one sheltered spot a clump
+of catnip was found, fresh, green, and aromatic, as if it were July
+instead of January.
+
+Sunday, the sixth, was a day of rare beauty and enticement. Well might
+the recording angel forgive the nature lover who forgot the promises
+made for him by his sponsors that he should "hear sermons," and who
+fared forth into the woods instead, first reciting "The groves were
+God's first temples," and then softly singing, "When God invites, how
+blest the day!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They err who think the winter woods void of life and color. Pause for
+a moment on the broad open flood-plain of the river, the winter fields
+and meadows stretching away in gentle slopes on either side. There are
+but few trees, but they have had room for full development and are
+noble specimens. All is gaiety. A blue-jay screams from a broad-topped
+white ash which is so full of winged seeds that it looks like a mass
+of foliage. The sable-robed king of the winter woods, the American
+crow, in the full vigor of his three-score years, maybe, (he lives to
+be a hundred) caws lustily from the bare white branches of a big
+sycamore, that queer anomaly of the forest which disrobes itself for
+the winter. The merry chickadees divide their time between the
+rustling, ragged bark of the red birches and the withered heads of
+heath-aster and blue vervain below. In the one they get the meat
+portion of their midday meal, and in the other the cereal foods. No
+wonder they are sleek and joyous.
+
+A few steps farther and we leave this broad alluvial bottom to enter
+the canon through which the river, ages ago, began to cut its course.
+These ridges of limestone, loess and drift rise a hundred feet or more
+above the level of the plain from which the river suddenly turns
+aside. They are thickly covered with timber. There is no angel with a
+flaming sword to keep you from passing into this winter paradise! The
+river bank is lined with pussy willows; they gleam in the sunshine
+like copper. Farther back there are different varieties of dogwood,
+some with delicate 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, then with a microscope. You
+will be charmed with the exquisite finish of their most minute parts.
+Nature glories in the artistic excellence of infinitesimal
+workmanship. The most beautiful part of her handiwork is that which is
+seen through a microscope. There is beauty, beauty everywhere; the
+crystals of the snow, the cell structure of the leaf, the scales of
+the butterfly's wing, the pedicels, capsules and cilia of these
+mosses. No wonder that many distinguished men have been led to give
+their whole lives to the study of mosses and have felt well repaid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here are Nature's only two elementary forms of growth, the cell and
+the crystal, wrestling for the mastery over each other in a life and
+death struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal
+forms. Below this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the
+sunshine, with its coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its
+broken shells of brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian,
+the Ordovician, and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust
+formed when first the earth began to cool, if any there be remaining;
+all these miles of rocks are inorganic, built up of crystals. But here
+on the surface, the tender green mosses and the bright lichens have
+begun the struggle of the cellular system for supremacy. These humble
+little rock-breakers will not rest until they have pulverized the
+rocks into soil sufficient to sustain higher forms of vegetable life.
+
+Once before, many millions of years ago, the cell life had won a
+partial victory over the crystal. In the great sub-tropical sea which
+once covered this spot, corals lived and flourished as they do now in
+similar seas. Myriads of brachiopods lived, moved, and had their
+being. Gigantic fish sported in the waters. Meanwhile older rocks were
+being denuded and disintegrated. Millions of tons of sediment were
+brought by the rivers and streams to the shores of the Devonian sea.
+Upheaval, change, transformation followed, and the tide of battle
+turned. Cell life was powerless before the vanquishing crystals of the
+infiltrating calcite. Only the inorganic part of that vast world of
+organic life here remains in these fossils to tell the story--the
+walls of the corals, the shells of the brachiopods, the teeth of the
+monster fishes. Then came succeeding ages, and finally the great
+glaciers which brought down the drift, rounded the sharp ridges,
+filled up the deep valleys and gorges, and gave to Iowa her fertile
+and inexhaustible soil. The earth was prepared to receive her king.
+The glaciers receded. Man came.
+
+Now here, on this bit of limestone rock, the struggle is on again. The
+mosses and the lichens have proceeded far enough in their work of
+disintegration to provide substance for the slender red stem of
+dogwood, which is growing out of the soil they have made. The fallen
+leaves of the surrounding trees follow the pioneer work of the mosses.
+The rain and the cracking frosts are other agencies. By and by the
+organic will triumph over the inorganic, the cell over the crystal,
+the plant over the rock, and where now the fossils lie beautiful
+flowers will bloom.
+
+The short winter day draws rapidly to a close and there is time for
+only a brief survey of the beauty of the upland trees. The fairy-like
+delicacy of the hop hornbeam, with its hop clusters and pointing
+catkins; the slender gracefulness of the chestnut oak; the Etruscan
+vase-like form of the white elm; the flaky bark and pungent, aromatic
+twigs of the black cherry; the massive, noble, silver-gray trunk of
+the white-oak; the lofty stateliness, filagree bark, and berry-like
+fruit of the hackberry; the black twigs of the black oaks, ashes,
+hickories and walnuts etched against the sky,--all these arrest your
+attention and retard your steps until the sun is near the horizon and
+you look over the tangled undergrowth of hazel, sumac, and briers, far
+through the trunks of the trees to the western sky which is bathed in
+flame color, as if from a forest fire.
+
+You are alone and yet not alone. A rabbit scurries across your
+pathway. A faint little squeak voices the fright of a mouse. There is
+a swoop of wings which you neither distinctly hear nor clearly see,
+yet you are aware, in a less marked degree than was the mouse, that an
+owl was near. You feel certain that the downy woodpecker is asleep in
+that neat little round hole on the southwest side of a tree trunk,
+just a little higher than you can reach. In the early afternoon you
+saw a red squirrel go gaily up a tall red oak and climb into his nest
+of leaves. You fancy he is snugly coiled there now. This recent hill
+of fresh dirt--strange sight in January--was surely made by a mole,
+and you know that they are all somewhere beneath your feet: moles,
+pocket gophers, and the pretty striped gopher which used to sit up on
+his hind legs, fold his front paws, and look at you in the summer
+time, then give a low whistle and duck; meadow mice in their cozy
+tunnels through which the water will be pouring when the spring
+freshets come; the woodchuck in his long, long sleep, and the chipmunk
+with his winter store of food. And so watching, listening, and musing
+you come at length to the western edge of the woodland and look across
+the prairie, far as the eye can reach, to where the red ball of the
+sun hangs scarce a yard above the horizon. You look upon a scene which
+is peculiar to this part of Iowa alone. It is not found in any other
+state or nation on earth. "These are the gardens of the desert, for
+which the speech of England has no name--the Prairies."
+
+       _"Lo they stretch
+    In airy undulations, far away,
+    As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell
+    Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
+    And motionless, forever."_
+
+The "rounded billows fixed" are the paha ridges which the glaciers
+made. They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its
+ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill
+from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch
+only the uppermost part of the white sails. The rest is concealed from
+view by the illusory rise of the foreground toward the horizon--for
+this twenty-mile stretch of prairie has an illusory curve similar to
+that seen from all ocean shores. But now the sun has disappeared and
+the windmills, houses, groves, and fences which looked like black
+etchings against the flame-colored sky slowly vanish, first far away
+toward the bluffs on the yon shore of the prairie sea, then nearer,
+nearer, comes the gloom until the fence across the first field is
+scarcely discernible. The bright vermilion fades at length to misty
+gray and lights appear in the windows of the farm homes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This sunset and twilight scene, peculiar to Iowa, is succeeded by the
+pageant of the stars. These are not peculiar, in neighboring
+latitudes, to any clime or time. They are the same stars which sang
+together when the foundations of the earth were fastened; the same
+calm stars upon which Adam gazed in remorse, the night he was driven
+from the garden of Eden. The Chinese, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians,
+the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans counted the hours of the night by
+the revolutions of the Greater and the Lesser Bear around Polaris, and
+guided their crafts and caravans by that sure star's light:
+
+      _"And therefore bards of old,
+    Sages and hermits of the solemn wood,
+      Did in thy beams behold
+    That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray
+    The voyager of time should shape his needful way."_
+
+These
+
+    _"Constellations of the early night
+    That sparkled brighter as the twilight died
+      And made the darkness glorious"_
+
+were mysteries to Ptolemy and to Plato, as well as to Job. All ages of
+mankind must have watched and wondered, pondering over the unsolved
+problems. When the First Great Cause projected all these whirling
+fire-mists into illimitable space with all the laws of physics,
+chemistry, evolution in perfect working order, did he choose this
+earth as humanity's only home? Is this the only planet with a plan of
+salvation? Is this mere speck among all the myriads of worlds in the
+solar system, and the other systems, the only creation of His hand
+which has known a Garden of Eden, a Bethlehem, and a Calvary? When the
+sun has lost his heat and the cold crystals of the earth have fought
+their last fight with cellular structures, and won; when all the fairy
+forms of field and forest are only fossils in the grim, gray rocks;
+when the music of bee and bird and breeze shall have waned into
+everlasting silence; when "all the pomp of yesterday is one with
+Nineveh and Tyre;" when man with all his achievements and triumphs,
+his love and laughter, his songs and sighs, is forgotten even more
+completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of
+the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become evolutionized
+into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality unto which
+the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall this
+subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so many
+varied forms, be wholly lost, or shall it pass joyfully through the
+ether to some brighter and better world? Is it true
+
+    _"That nothing walks with aimless feet;
+      That no one life shall be destroyed,
+      Or cast as rubbish to the void,
+    When God hath made the pile complete?"_
+
+We are scarce a step ahead of our forefathers. We do not know.
+
+    _"Behold, we know not anything;
+      I can but trust that good shall fall
+      At last--far off--at last to all,
+    And every winter change to spring."_
+
+
+
+
+II. FEBRUARY IN STORM AND SHINE.
+
+
+February often opens with a season of cold gray days when stratus
+clouds, dark and unrelenting as iron, hang across the sky and bitter
+winds from the northwest blow down the Iowa valleys and over the
+frost-cracked ridges. In the city the wheels crunch on the scanty
+snow, and every window is made opaque by the frost. Trains are many
+hours late, and dense clouds of steam from locomotive funnels condense
+into vivid whiteness in the wintry air. Nuthatches, woodpeckers, and
+chickadees join the English sparrows in begging crumbs and scraps
+around the kitchen door. In the timber the wind rustles shiveringly
+through the leaves which still cling to some of the oaks. The music of
+the woods is reduced to a minimum. Life is a serious business for
+everyone who has to work in order that he may eat; there is little
+time or spirit for song. In the late forenoon and again in the middle
+of the afternoon the rattle of bills may be heard on the branches; at
+other times the woods are almost silent, save for the cracking of the
+earth as it heaves under the frost, and the boom of the ever
+thickening ice on the river.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then the south wind steals across King Winter's borderland, and the
+iron clouds begin to relax. But at first there seems little
+improvement. "The south end of a north wind," say the experienced, and
+shiver. But wait. Every hour the wind grows warmer and the clouds
+softer. They come closer to the earth, hanging like a thick curtain
+across the sky. On the prairie the diameter of the circling horizon
+seems scarcely three miles long. The clouds hug the far sides of the
+nearest ridges and shut you in, above and around. It must have been
+such a day as this when Fitzgerald made that line of the Rubaiyat
+read: "And this inverted bowl they call the sky." Today the bowl seems
+very small and dreary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By and by a snowflake falls, then a few others, soft as the spray of
+the thistle in the early days of October. Gently as the fairy balloons
+of the dandelion they float through the air and rest upon the withered
+leaves of the white oaks. Soon they come faster, and now the
+forest-crowned ridge half a mile away which was in plain sight a
+minute ago is screened from view by the fast falling white curtain.
+
+"He giveth snow like wool." Very beautiful is this snow as it softens
+the rugged, corky limbs of the mossy cup oaks. It is not like the
+hard, granular snow which stung your face like sand when you were out
+in the storm a month ago, when the trumpets of the sky were doing a
+fanfare, the wind raged from the northwest, the top of a tall black
+cherry snapped like a shipmast and crashed through the forest rigging
+to the white deck below, while the gnarled limbs of the big elms
+looked like the muscles of giants wrestling with the storm king. This
+storm to-day is not "announced by all the trumpets of the sky." It
+comes softly as the breath of morning on a May meadow. It silences
+every sound and curtains you into a rare studio where you may admire
+its own exceeding beauty. There have not been so many beautiful snow
+crystals in any storm of the winter. You may see half a dozen
+different varieties on your coat sleeve with the naked eye, and you
+pull out a strong lens the better to observe the exceeding beauty of
+these six pointed stars. They are among Nature's most exquisite
+forms, and they are shown in bewildering variety. The molecules of
+snow arrange themselves in crystals of the hexagonal system, every
+angle exactly sixty degrees. The white color of the snow is caused by
+a combination of the prismatic colors of these snow crystals. Some of
+them are regular hexagons, with six straight sides; others are like a
+wheel with six spokes, with jewels clinging to each spoke. Many men
+have spent a lifetime in the study of these fairy forms. W. A.
+Bentley, of the United States weather bureau, after twenty years of
+faithful work, has more than a thousand photographs of these crystals,
+no two alike. Every storm yields him a new set of pictures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a little while the snow grows damp and the flakes grow larger,
+making downy blankets for the babes in the woods--the hepaticas, the
+mosses, the ferns. The catkins of the hazelbrush are edged with white.
+The slender stems of the meadow-sweet begin to droop beneath the
+weight of the snow. The delicate yellow pointed buds of the wild
+gooseberry look like topaz gems in a setting of white pearl. The snow
+falls faster and the wood becomes a ghost world. The dull red torches
+of the smooth sumac are extinguished. The fine, delicate spray of the
+hop hornbeam is a fairy net whose every mesh is fringed with
+immaculate beauty. The little clusters of fine twigs here and there in
+the hackberry grow into spheres of fleecy fruit. The snow sticks to
+the tree trunks and makes a compass out of every one, a more accurate
+compass than the big radical leaves of the rosin weed in the early
+fall.
+
+As the day darkens the ghost-like effect of the storm in the woods is
+all the more marked. The trees stand like silent specters, and at
+every turn in the path you come upon strange shadow shapes of shrub
+and bush. The snow is piling high under the hazelbrush and the sumac,
+stumps of trees become soft white mounds, and the little brook has
+curving banks of beauty.
+
+There is a thrill and an exaltation in such a storm. The depressing
+influences of the earlier day are no more. As you resolutely walk
+homeward through the storm and the deep snow, you feel the heart grow
+strong as it pumps the blood to every fiber of your being. You know
+why the men of the north, Iowa men, have virile brain and sovereign
+will. The snow is deep and the way is long, but yet you smile--a
+reverent smile--as you think of Hawthorne writing of a snow storm by
+taking occasional peeps from the study windows of his old manse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning the world seems to have been re-created. It is as fresh
+and pure and full of light and beauty as if it had just come from the
+Creator's hand with not one single stain or shame or pain. It is one
+of the few rare mornings that come in all seasons of the year when
+Nature's every aspect is so beautiful that even the most
+unappreciative are charmed into admiration; a great white sparkling
+world below, and a limitless azure world above. The clouds have all
+been blown away and you rejoice in the loftiness of the big blue dome.
+It is so very high that there seems to be no dome. You are looking
+straight through into the boundless blue of interstellar space, the
+best object lesson of infinity which earth has to offer. The ocean
+that washes the shores of continents has its bounds which it may not
+pass, and mariners have well-known ways across it. The ocean of human
+thought is vaster, but it, also, has finite bounds and man shall
+hardly make great voyages upon it without crossing, perhaps following,
+the track of some earlier Columbus. But this limitless ocean which we
+call the sky has no finite bounds, no tracks, no charts, no Cabots. It
+is measureless and all-embracing as Divine love. You and Polaris are
+enwrapped by both. The farthest star is but a beacon light on some
+shore island of this sublime sea of space; and it beckons upward and
+outward to the unknown beyond.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yesterday's three-mile diameter of the horizon has been multiplied by
+ten. There is a far sweep of the landscape which makes the soul
+thrill. This is the supreme pleasure of the prairies. The Iowa man who
+goes to the Rockies is at first awed and charmed by the mountain
+grandeur, but soon he pines like a caged bird. The high peaks shut him
+in as a prison. He sighs for a sight of the plains, for the feeling of
+room and liberty that belongs to the wider sky-reach. On the prairies
+the love of truth and liberty grows as easily as the morning light.
+
+The sun rose clear and golden and now is almost white, so clear is the
+atmosphere. The snow crystals break the white light into all the
+prismatic colors,--rubies and garnets, emeralds and sapphires, topaz
+and amethyst, all sparkle in the brilliant light. The shadow of the
+solitary elm's trunk, here on the prairie, has very clear cut edges
+and is tinted with blue. The finely reticulated shadows of the
+graceful twigs are sharply shadowed on the snow beneath,--a winter
+picture worthy of a master hand.
+
+In the enjoyment of such beauty as this is the only real wealth. Money
+cannot buy it. Hirelings cannot take it from the lowly and give it to
+the proud. No trust can corner it. No canvas can screen it from the
+eye of him who has not silver to give the cathedral care-taker.
+February, like June, may be had by the poorest comer. But it is like
+Ruskin's Faubourg St. Germain. Before you may enjoy it you shall be
+worthy of it.
+
+      _"Such beauty, varying in the light,
+    Of living nature, cannot be portrayed
+    By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill;
+    But is the property of him alone
+    Who hath beheld it, noted it with care,
+    And in his mind recorded it with love."_
+
+Leave the prairie and enter the forest which crowns the neighboring
+ridge. Here are more of those blue shadows on the snow. The delicate
+blue sky is faintly reflected on the snow in the full sunlight, but it
+is more obvious in the shadow; in some places its hue is almost
+indigo. This sky reflection is one of the most beautiful of Nature's
+winter exhibitions. Towards sundown the snow-capped ridges will
+sometimes be tinged with pink. And in a red sunset the winter trees
+will sometimes throw shadows of green, the complementary color, on the
+snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You are early in the woods. Nature's children are not yet astir. The
+silence is profound; but it is a fruitful, uplifting silence. There
+are no sounds to strike the most delicate strings in that wondrous
+harp of your inner ear. But if your spiritual ear is attentive you
+should catch those forest voices that fall softer than silence and
+speak of peace and purity, truth and beauty.
+
+Soon the silence is broken. Curiously, the first sound you hear comes
+from advanced civilization, the rumble of a train fifteen miles away.
+On a still morning like this one can hardly stand five full minutes on
+any spot in the whole state of Iowa without hearing the sound of a
+train. There are no more trackless prairies, no more terrors of
+blizzards. Pioneer days have passed away. The railroads have brought
+security, comfort, prosperity, intelligence, and the best of the
+world's work, physical and mental, fresh at the door every morning.
+
+Whirr! There goes a ruffed grouse from the snow, scarce a rod ahead.
+In a moment, up goes another. Too bad to rout them from their bed
+under the roots of a fallen tree. Farther on a rabbit scurries from
+another log. There is his "form" fresh in the snow.
+
+The river, away down below, begins to boom and crack. The ice is like
+the tight head of a big bass drum, but the drummer is inside and the
+sound comes muffled. The frost is the peg which tightens all the
+strings of earth and makes them vibrant. The tinkle of sleigh bells on
+the wagon road fully a mile away comes with peculiar clearness.
+
+When the sun is more than half way from the horizon to the meridian,
+Nature begins to wake up. A chickadee emerges from his hole in the
+decaying trunk of a red oak and cheeps softly as he flies to the
+branch of a slippery elm. His merry "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" brings
+others of his race, and away they all go down to the red birches on
+the river bottom. The metallic quanks of a pair of nuthatches call
+attention to the upper branches of a big white oak. A chickadee and
+one of the nuthatches see a tempting morsel at the same time. A
+spiteful peck from nuthatch leaves him master of the morsel and the
+field. But the chickadee does not care. He flies down and spies a
+stalk of golden-rod above the snow on which there is a round object
+looking like a small onion. Chickadee doesn't know that this is the
+spherical gall of the _trypeta solidaginis_, but he does know that it
+contains a fat white grub. He knows, too, that there is a beveled
+passage leading to a cell in the center and that the outer end of this
+passage is protected by a membrane window. After some balancing and
+pirouetting he smashes the window with his bill, runs his long tongue
+down the passageway, gulps the grub and away he flies to join his
+comrades down in the birches, chirping gaily as he goes.
+
+Downy woodpecker "pleeks" his happiness as he excavates the twig of a
+silver maple. Probably he has found the larvae which the wood wasp left
+there in the fall. The big hairy woodpecker flies across the clearing
+with a strident scream. Next to the crow and the jay he is the
+noisiest fellow in the winter woods. He hammers away at a decaying
+basswood and the chips which fall are an inch and a half long. His
+hammering is almost as loud as the bark of a squirrel in the trees
+across the river. The blood-red spot on the back of his head has an
+exquisite glow in the sunshine, and you get a fine look at it, for he
+is busily working little more than a rod from where you stand. He does
+wonderful work with that strong bill. One decaying basswood found
+recently was eighteen inches in diameter and the woodpeckers had
+drilled big holes clear through it. The pile of their chips at the
+base would have filled a bushel basket.
+
+By the time you have reached the spring the woods are full of life and
+sound, and the spring itself adds to the winter music. The rocks where
+it bubbles out are thickly covered with hoar frost. One of the big
+blocks of limestone in its causeway is covered with ice, clear and
+viscid as molten glass. The river is bridged over with ice twenty
+inches thick, save only the little gulf stream into which the spring
+pours its waters. From the surface of this stream thin smoky wreaths
+of vapor rise and are changed into crystals by the frosty air. But the
+waters of the spring gush forth as abundantly and musically now as
+they did in the hot days of last July, and the clam-shell with which
+you then drank is still in its place by the rock. The pure, melodious,
+beautiful spring makes its own environment, regardless of
+surroundings. Its sources are in the unfailing hills. It suggests the
+lives of some men and women whose friendship you enjoy, and who are
+ever ready to refresh you on life's way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The wind of last night has carried much of the snow over the top of
+the ridge and deposited it in this sheltered slope of the river canon.
+Here are wind-formed caves of sculptured snow, vaulted with a tender
+blue. Turrets and towers sparkle in the splendid light. All angles are
+softened, and everywhere the lines of the snow curves are smooth and
+flowing. The drift sweeps down from the footpath way on the river bank
+to the ice-bound bed of the river in graceful lines. Where the side of
+the canon is more precipitous there is equal beauty. Each shrub has
+its own peculiar type amidst the broken drift. The red cedar, which is
+Iowa's nearest approach to a pine, except in a few favored counties,
+hangs from the top of the crag heavily festooned with feathery snow.
+Those long creeping lines on which the crystals sparkle are only
+brambles, and that big rosette of rusty red and fluffy white is the
+New Jersey tea. Those spreading, pointed fingers of coral with a
+background of dazzling white are the topmost twigs of the red osier
+dogwood. The strip of shrubs with graceful spray, now bowed in beauty
+by the river's brink, is a group of young red birches, and this bunch
+of downy brown twigs, two feet above the snow, sparkling with frost
+particles, is the downy viburnum. The great tangle of vine and lace
+work mixed with snow is young hop hornbeam, supporting honeysuckle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Viewed from the window of a railway train, the February fields and
+woods seem dead and dreary. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
+Every twig is lined with living buds, carefully covered with scales.
+Inside those scales are leaves and blossoms deftly packed, as only
+Mother Nature could pack them. Split one down the middle and examine
+it with your lens. You will see the little tender leaves, and often
+the blossoms, ready to break out in beauty when the warm days come
+and flood the world with color. Men try to photograph nature, but no
+photograph could do justice to the clustered buds of the red maple or
+the downy buds of the slippery elm. The long green gray buds of the
+butternut, pistillate flowers in some, staminate flowers in others;
+the saffron buds of the butternut hickory; the ruby buds of the bass
+wood; the varnished bud scales of the sycamore and the poplar; the big
+gummy scales which protect the pussy catkins of the aspen; the queer
+little buds of the sumac and the rusty buds of the ash; every one of
+these refutes the aspersions cast upon the winter woods by those who
+never go out to see. In their noble beauty of massive and graceful
+form, with their exquisite symmetry of outline, their varied
+arrangement of branches and twigs, giving to every species an
+individual expression, every twig studded with these gem-like buds,
+how very beautiful are the winter trees! One might almost find it in
+his heart to feel sorry that this rare mingling of sculpture and
+fretwork and lace is soon to be draped with a mantle of green.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Why did Bryant dwell so often on the theme of death in Nature? The
+reminders of death are very few compared with the signs of life.
+Break off a twig from the aspen and taste the bark. The strong quinine
+flavor is like a spring tonic. Cut a branch of the black cherry, peel
+back the bark, and smell the pungent, bitter almond aroma, which of
+itself is enough to identify this tree. Every sense tells of life; the
+smell of the cherry, the taste of the aspen, the touch of the velvety
+mosses and the gummy buds on the poplars, the color of the twigs and
+buds, the music of the birds, all these say, "There is no death."
+
+Every time you plant your feet upon the snow you press down thousands
+of seeds, minute forms of life, each with its little store of starch
+or albumen, carefully compounded in Nature's laboratory, sufficient to
+sustain the embryonic life until the tiny plantlet learns to draw
+nourishment from the breast of Mother Earth and to breathe health and
+vigor from the sunshine and the air. By the wayside, in stony places,
+among thorns and on good ground, Nature sows her seeds with lavish
+hand. Every tree and shrub and herb, itself held fast to one place,
+tries to give its offspring as great a start in the world as possible.
+Even in late February one may see some of Nature's airships, designed
+to carry seeds. They are all built on the same principle, not to rise
+in the air, but to fly as far away from the tree as possible when
+falling from the branch. The basswood puts its seeds into little
+hollow wooden balls, then makes a sail out of a leaf and sets it at
+just the right angle to balance the seeds and catch the breeze. The
+winged samaras of the ash and the box elder are other modifications of
+the same principle. The round balls of the sycamore hang till the high
+winds of March loosen their strong stalks and then they break open and
+the club-shaped nutlets inside spread their bristly hairs to the
+breeze. The hop-like strobiles of the hop hornbeam seem especially
+made to blow over the surface of the frozen snow; they drop off the
+queer little oblong bags as they go and thus the smooth small nuts
+inside are planted. The oaks, hickories, walnuts, butternuts,
+hazelnuts, trust their fruits to the feet of passersby and to the
+squirrels and blue jays which fail to find many of their buried acorns
+and nuts. The big three-valved balloons of the bladdernut can sail
+either in the air, on the water, or over the frozen snow. The pretty
+clusters of the wild yam, seen climbing over the hazelbrush in the
+rich winter woods, have two ways of navigating in the wind; either
+the three-sided, papery capsule floats as a whole, or it splits
+through the winged angles and then the flat seeds with their
+membranaceous wings have a chance to flutter a foot or two away where
+haply they may find a square inch of unoccupied soil. The desmodium,
+the bidens, the agrimony and the cocklebur, which stick to your
+clothes even as late as February, are only using you as a Moses to
+lead their children to their promised land. These herb stalks above
+the snow, the corymbose heads of the yarrow, the spikes of the
+self-heal, the crosiers of the golden-rod, the panicles of the asters,
+the racemes of the Indian tobacco, the knotted threads of the blue
+vervain and the plantain, the miniature mandarin temples of the
+peppergrass--all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to
+be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April
+mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and
+the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and
+wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of an eager,
+expectant life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The snow is winter's great gift to states like Iowa. He is unwise who
+complains of the tender, protecting, nourishing, fructifying mantle
+of immaculate white. Where the snow lies deepest in winter, there
+shall you find the greatest flush of new life in the spring. Down
+under the snow Nature's chemical laboratory is at work. Take a stick
+and dig under the thick white blanket into the black soil. Here are
+bulbs and buds, corms and tubers, rootstalks and rhizomes, which were
+pumped full of starch and albumen in the hot days of last August. So
+far as modern science is able to tell, chemical changes are in
+constant progress in all these forms of underground life, preparing
+for the coming glory of the living green. Nature never dies. She
+scarcely sleeps.
+
+Tracks on the all-revealing snow tell of an equal abundance of animal
+life. These rabbit tracks, scarcely two feet apart, tell how happily
+bunny was going. But farther on a dog came across at an angle and gave
+chase. The tracks are now farther apart, three feet, four feet, as up
+bunny goes to his burrow under the shelving rock. One last bound,
+nearly five feet, and he was safe. That was once when "heaven was
+gained at a single bound."
+
+Bunny was too far away from home that time. Here is his usual runway
+from the burrow to the brook, and the nibbled barks of the saplings
+tell of a tender breakfast before he went prospecting. Rabbits usually
+run in beaten paths.
+
+These narrow tracks where dainty feet printed a double line of
+opposite dots across the snow were made by the whitefooted mouse, and
+the little continuous line between them was made by his dragging tail.
+The legend is like this, :-:-:-:-:-. Farther on are similar tracks,
+but alternate instead of opposite, like this,',',','. They were made
+by the short-tailed shrew. Still farther along a queer little ridge is
+seen in the snow across the wood road. It is the tunnel of the meadow
+mouse. Part of its fragile roof has fallen in and you may stoop and
+look into the little round tunnel which ran from the burrow to some
+granary under a log.
+
+There goes a squirrel, angling away from you, his red bushy tail high
+in the air as he runs through the deep snow down the side of the ridge
+to a big, corky-barked oak, up which he goes to wait in his hollow up
+there until you have passed by. He did not seem to be going very fast
+but when you walk over to his tracks you find they are farther apart
+than you can step. The groups of four are about as broad as your
+hand, and they are deep where the snow lies thick. But on the firmer
+snow at the crest of the ridge, before the squirrel became alarmed,
+they did not break through the crust, and the marks of the dainty toes
+are plainly seen. There are also the remains of a sweet acorn which
+the squirrel dug out of the deep snow under a white oak. Back to the
+river where the stream from the spring makes open water you find some
+queer tracks on the fresh snow; there is a round spot as big as a
+quarter in each one, faint radiating lines in front ending with the
+marks of sharp toes; these were made by the soft-padded foot and
+webbed toes of the mink.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Most of the insect life is snugly hidden, but much is in plain sight.
+A clump of pussy willows bears many queer-shaped clusters which the
+entomologist calls pine cone galls; in the center of each one a larva
+dwells in his silken case. On the red oaks over head are other
+galls,--the oak apples. The buttonbush has the ash-colored cocoon of
+the giant silkworm, made out of a rolled leaf, the petiole of which is
+fastened to the branch with silk. Many others are to be found for the
+looking. All tell the story of Nature's abundant life,--even the
+morning after a February snow storm. All speak
+
+    _"Of one maternal spirit bringing forth
+    And cherishing with ever constant love,
+    That tires not, nor betrays."_
+
+But snowstorms will soon be over. The nature-lover's spring begins
+near the end of the month, sometimes just before, sometimes just
+after. The snow and the ice will be honeycombed by the sun and we
+shall begin to look for the sap trickling from the maple, and to
+strain our ears for the first note of the wild goose and the
+blue-bird,
+
+    _"While winter, slumbering in the open air
+    Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."_
+
+The frequent rambler through the winter woods can scarcely fail to
+become acquainted with all the winter birds. The different species are
+not numerous, few of them are very shy, they are easily seen because
+of the bare trees, and their habits tend to call attention to them;
+especially is this true of the woodpeckers. It is true, of course,
+that one may sometimes walk in the woods for hours, scarcely seeing a
+single bird. But it is also true that if he starts out some sunny
+morning, and seeks a tract of heavy timber near a river, he will be
+very likely to see and hear nearly all of them.
+
+Such a ramble was enjoyed during the halcyon days we had this year
+(1907) in February. By 10 o'clock the woods were fairly ringing with
+bird-calls. Over a meadow, near the entrance to the woods, a
+red-tailed hawk was circling about twenty-five feet from the ground,
+as if in search of meadow mice. The field glass showed the black band
+on his breast and tail, which, with his bright red tail, sufficiently
+established his identity.
+
+The first bird seen in the woods was a white-breasted nuthatch,
+working on the trunk of a red birch on the river bottom. Next to the
+chickadee, he is the tamest bird of the woodlands. One may easily get
+within six feet of him, as was done on this occasion, and admire his
+beautiful ashy-blue coat, his white vest and white cheeks, with his
+black cap and nape. He pulled a fat white grub from the birch with his
+long, slender bill and ate it with evident relish. Then he uttered
+his soft "quank, quank" and gently flew to another tree.
+
+Sometimes these "quank, quanks" come in a loud and rapid series and
+may easily be heard a quarter of a mile on a still day.
+
+A flock of juncos were busy among the dead leaves and the snow. They
+are sparrow-size, like the nuthatch, and their faint chirpings are
+much like those of the chickadee. The slate gray of their head,
+throat, back and breast is an interesting color, and is relieved from
+somberness by the white under parts and the yellow bills. The white
+outer tailfeathers show plainly as they fly. They frequent the road
+through the timber and have some of the habits of the English sparrow.
+The winter woods would miss them.
+
+Chickadees were busy in the birches. Surely the chickadee is one of
+the dearest little fellows that fly. He has four modes of expression:
+
+1. The well-known "Chick-a-dee-dee-dee."
+
+2. The "pe-ho," which ought to be written "la sol," pitched at about
+upper D and C, above the soprano staff, and timed like two quarter
+notes.
+
+3. The faint chirpings as he works.
+
+4. A happy little gurgling song, which can hardly be translated into
+words.
+
+The chickadee wears a black cap with a white vest and a blue-gray
+coat, completing his costume with a black necktie, and he is perfectly
+willing to sit for you and have his picture taken.
+
+Mr. Blue Jay sat in a clump of dogwood, doing nothing. He was not so
+tame as the others and yet he permitted a twenty-foot view of his
+blue-gray coat, his aristocratic crest, his dusky white vest, his
+white-tipped tail and the black band across the back of his head, down
+the neck and across the breast--like a black collar worn very low
+down. It was a spring-like morning, the thermometer rapidly rising
+toward forty-five, and Mr. Blue Jay was in one of his imitative moods.
+There is hardly a limit to his vocabulary, and it would not be
+surprising if some of his imitative stunts should be mistaken for the
+call of an early robin. Among these calls is a liquid gurgle, like
+hard cider coming out of the neck of a big brown jug. Another, and a
+common one, is two slurred eighth notes, repeated, "sol te, sol
+te"--upper G and B in the key of C.
+
+Meanwhile the woods had been resounding with the lively tattoo of the
+woodpecker, and finally Downy was found at the top of a dead dry elm,
+busily doing this reveille, fast and loud as the roll of a snare drum.
+His head was going so fast that it looked like a quick series of heads
+and the tree rattled so it could be heard afar. Most writers regard
+this as the woodpecker's love call, a sign of spring, as it were--but
+Downy is usually heard and seen doing it on warm days every month in
+the winter. The females are seen at it almost as often as the males;
+the latter are known by the scarlet band at the back of the head.
+Perhaps it is not a love call after all; it may be only the exuberance
+of spirits caused by a fine breakfast and a warm morning.
+
+Downy kept it up, heedless of the human observer. But when a red
+squirrel ran up the tree to within four feet of the spot chosen for a
+sounding board, Downy suddenly left. The squirrel sat in the sunshine
+and smoothed his fur with his nose and his paws, like a cat.
+
+Two big hairy woodpeckers were on a neighboring tree, but they were
+not so fearless. One can hardly get nearer than thirty feet. The field
+glass is a great help in such cases, and no one should go to the woods
+without one, or at least a good opera glass. These two were both
+males. That could be easily told by the bright scarlet band on the
+back of their heads. The rest of the plumage is much like the downy
+woodpecker. Both have beautiful black wings, spotted and striped with
+white and a broad white stripe down the back. Downy's white outer
+tail-feathers are barred with black; the Hairy's are all white. Downy
+is sparrow-size; Hairy is robin-size. Downy is usually a gentle
+creature; Hairy is aggressive and militant. Downy is a little Lord
+Fauntleroy; Hairy is a Robin Hood.
+
+One other woodpecker was seen on this lucky bird-day. It was the
+red-bellied woodpecker, more rare and more shy than either of the
+others. His breast is a grayish white tinged with red, and his back is
+barred white and black like a ladder; but the black is not so deep and
+vivid as that of the other woodpeckers. He has no white stripe down
+the middle of his back. His nape and crest are both scarlet and he
+utters a hoarser squeak than either the downy or the hairy.
+
+One of the events of the day was the sight of the winter wren, the
+first time he had been seen this winter. He was working among the
+stumps of trees at the brink of the river, under the ice which had
+been left clinging to the trees when the high water receded. There was
+no mistaking his beautiful coat of cinnamon brown, his pert manner,
+his tail which was a little more than straight up, pointing towards
+his head; a little mite of a bird, how does he keep his little body
+from freezing in the furious winter storms? He seemed perfectly happy,
+with his two sharp, shrill, impatient "quip quaps," much shriller than
+the "pleeks" of downy woodpecker.
+
+A flock of tree sparrows were busy in and around a big thicket of wild
+gooseberry bushes on the upland. You may easily get within a rod of
+them, but hardly closer, and a field glass is almost a necessity to
+careful study. He is a grayish, graceful sparrow, with streaks of
+reddish brown, chestnut caps, and a small black spot in the middle of
+the brownish breast. One white wing bar is a distinguishing
+characteristic, and a better one is the difference in color of the two
+mandibles; the upper one is black and the lower one yellow. The
+tinkling notes of the tree sparrows sound like the music a pipe
+organist makes when he uses the sweet organ and the flute stop.
+
+A sharp watch was kept for goldfinches and the evening grosbeak
+during the day, but neither was seen. This was something of a
+disappointment. But it was forgotten in the thrill of joy that came
+late in the afternoon. There was a wide stretch of river bottom,
+walled in on the west by a high and forest-crowned ridge; on the east
+was the river, with a hundred foot fringe of noble trees, not yet
+sacrificed to the axe of the woodsman. The sun was just above the tops
+of the trees on the western ridge and long rays of slanting light came
+pink across the river flood-plain, investing the tree-tops by the
+shore with a soft and radiant light. Suddenly there came a plaintive
+little note from the bottom of a near-by tree, instantly recognized as
+a new note in the winter woods. Then another, and another, leading the
+eyes to the foot of a big bass-wood, where a graceful bird, with a
+beautiful blue back and a reddish brown breast, as if his coat had
+been made of the bright blue sky and his vest of the shining red sand,
+was hopping. The field glass brought him within ten feet. A bluebird,
+sure enough! The first real, tangible sign of the spring that is to
+be, the first voice from the southland telling us that spring is
+coming up the valleys. There is no mistaking the brilliant blue, the
+most beautiful blue in the Iowa year, unless it be the blue of the
+fringed gentian in the fall; and the soft reddish, earthy breast
+enhances the beauty of the brilliant back.
+
+Another hopped into view; the female, doubtless, for both the blue and
+the reddish brown were less brilliant. Every well-regulated bluebird
+ought to be seen in the top of a tall elm or maple; but these seemed
+to have no high-flying inclinations. Maybe they could read in the
+clouds beneath the setting sun a prediction of the snow which came
+that night. They stayed a few moments and then slowly hopped away and
+were lost among the tree trunks. A further search only frightened a
+prairie chicken from beneath a hawthorne bush, where he had meant to
+pass the night; and the bluebirds were not seen again. But the sight
+of bluebirds in Iowa on the nineteenth day of February is glory enough
+for one day.
+
+
+
+
+III. MARCH--AND A SPRING BOUQUET
+
+
+Every pilgrim to the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in
+sunny valleys where the tender goddess first reveals herself at
+Nature's living altars. Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she
+will first appear. She delights in surprising her votaries. Thoreau
+was right in saying that no man was ever alert enough to behold the
+first manifestation of spring. Sometimes as we walk toward the mossy
+bank in the glen where the fresh green leaves of the haircap mosses
+were last year's first signs of vernal verdure, the bluebird calls to
+us from the torch-like top of the smooth sumac and shyly tells us
+that, if we please, spring is here. Sometimes we thrill with the
+"honk, honk" of the Canada goose and think the A-shaped band of
+migrants is surely this year's messenger, crying in the wilderness to
+prepare the way of the goddess and make her paths straight; but a
+little later we pass through a shadowy ravine where the white oaks
+have held their leaves all winter, and find that the great horned owl
+has already appropriated a last year's hawk's nest and deposited
+therein her two white eggs. At the foot of the sunny hill where the
+spring has freely flowed all winter long, we tramp around the swamp in
+the vain hope of finding the purplish monk's-hood of the skunk's
+cabbage; but look up to see, instead, the many "mouse ears," shining
+like bits of silvery fur, along the slender stems of the pussy willow.
+Or we tramp through a hazel thicket, where the squirrels have been
+festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the
+myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened
+until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find
+neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the
+chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen
+tree from whose every flower-bud spring is peeping.
+
+Nature's first flowers are those of the amentaceous trees, and the
+earliest of these are the pussy willow, the quaking asp, and the
+hazel. All of them are quick to respond to the kindly influences of a
+vase of water and a sunny window and we may have all three of these
+first blossoms in a spring bouquet at home by the first of March.
+Towards the last of February the catkins of the pussy willows and the
+aspens are creeping from beneath their budscales to meet the goddess
+of spring half way, and every warm day in March coaxes them a little
+farther. Meanwhile the staminate catkins of the hazel are lengthening
+and the pistillate buds are swelling, as the sun presses farther
+northward at the dawn and the dusk of each day, pushing back the gray
+walls of the canon of night, that the river of day may flow full and
+free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This year some of the aspens heralded the spring. They grew at the
+head of a little creek which traversed a long, sunny, sheltered swamp.
+Their gray green trunks were in the foreground of the Master Planter's
+color design, the darker and taller background being a mixture of wild
+cherry, red oak, linden, and white ash. The high notes were given by
+the rose purple of the raspberry, the dark maroon of the blackberry,
+and the orange varnished budscales of the aspens themselves,--Nature
+never forgets her color accents. In the earliest warm days of February
+the catkins of the aspens were peeping from their imprisoning scales,
+and by the first of March they were half out, their white silken
+fringes and tiny clusters of rose-pink stamens glistening in the
+sunlight as if spring's pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur.
+We look up at these fleecy clusters, freed from the brownish
+budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must
+have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent
+Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of
+aspen poplars, a fountain and a meadow."
+
+Only an aspen tree in an Iowa slough! Yes, but more than that. This is
+the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring. When the
+pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the
+commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more
+than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; that
+whosoever entered the temple of Lindus, to do honor to Demeter, the
+productive and nourishing power of the earth, must be pure in heart if
+he would gain reward. The square, the flag, the cross, the swelling
+bud of spring, what are they all but symbols of the realities?
+
+We shall forget these first humble flowers of spring by-and-by when
+we find a brilliant cardinal flower, or a showy lady's slipper, just
+as we forget the timid, tender tones of the bluebird when the grand
+song of the grosbeak floods the evening air, or the exquisite melody
+of the hermit thrush spiritualizes the leafy woods; just as many a man
+forgets the ministrations of his humbler friends in early life when he
+has climbed into the society of those whom earth calls great. But the
+aspens will neither grieve nor murmur. They will continue to make
+delightful color contrasts with their smooth white trunks at the
+gateways of the dark woods in winter and whisper to every lightest
+breeze with their delicate leaves in summer. The aspen, like the
+grass, hastens to cover every wound and burn on the face of nature. It
+follows the willow in reclaiming the sandy river bottoms and replaces
+the pines which fire has swept from the Rocky Mountain slopes. It has
+a record in the rocks and a richer story in literature. Its trembling
+leaves have caught the attention of all the poets from Homer until
+now. The Scottish legend says they tremble because the cross of
+Calvary was made from an aspen tree. The German legend says the
+trembling is a punishment because the aspen refused to bow when the
+Lord of Life walked in the forest. But the Hebrew chronicler says that
+the Lord once made his presence upon the earth heard in the movement
+of the aspen leaves. "And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a sound of
+going in the tops of the aspen [wrongly translated mulberry] trees,
+that then thou shalt go forth to battle; for God is gone before thee
+to smite the host of the Philistines." What a fine conception of the
+nearness of the Omnipresent and the gentleness of the Almighty! No
+sound or sign from the larger trees! Only the whisper of the lightest
+leaves in the aspen tops when the Maker of the world went by!
+
+The aspen was made the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine. And
+Homer, in describing the Cyclops' country, speaks of it as a land of
+soft marshy meadows, good rich crumbling plow land, and beautiful
+clear springs, with aspens all around them. How much that sounds like
+a description of Iowa!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The willow is equally distinguished. The roots of its "family tree"
+are in the cretaceous rocks and its branches spread through the waters
+of Babylon, the Latin eclogues, the wondrous fire in the Knightes'
+Tale, Shakespeare's plays, the love songs of Herrick and Moore, and
+across the ocean to the New World, adorning the sermons of Cotton
+Mather, the humor of Hosea Bigelow, and the nature poems of Whittier.
+
+    _"For ages, on our river borders,
+      These tassels in their tawny bloom
+    And willowy studs of downy silver
+      Have prophesied of spring to come.
+
+    "Thanks, Mary, for this wildwood token
+      Of Freya's footsteps drawing near;
+    Almost, as in the rune of Asgard,
+      The growing of the grass I hear."_
+
+Nor must the hazel in this earliest spring bouquet be forgotten. The
+crimson stars of its fertile flowers, ten or a dozen little rays at
+the ends of the scaly buds on the bare stems, are the most richly
+colored flowers of the earliest spring. Some years they are formed as
+early as the twentieth of March. When you find them then look for the
+re-appearance of the mud-turtles down in the valleys and listen for
+the first feeble croaks of the frogs. The old Greeks watched the tiny
+inner scales of these fertile flowers grow into the husk of the nut,
+fancied its resemblance to a helmet, and called the bush _corys_;
+whence its botanic name _corylus_. Its English name comes from the
+Saxon _haesle_, a cap. The growing hazel nuts gladdened the children
+of most of the early civilized world. One of the shepherds in Vergil's
+fifth eclogue invites the other to "sit beneath the grateful shade,
+which hazels interlaced with elms have made;" but this hazel of which
+Menelaus spoke was a tree. The Romans regarded the hazel as an emblem
+of peace and a means of reconciling those who had been estranged. When
+the gods made Mercury their messenger they gave him a hazel rod to be
+used in restoring harmony among the human race. Later he added the
+twisted serpents at the top of this caduceus. The caduceus also had
+the power of producing sleep, hence Milton calls it "the opiate rod."
+
+When the crimson threads appear in the scaly buds the staminate
+catkins are lengthening, and soon the high wind shakes the golden
+pollen over all the copse. These flowers which appear before the
+leaves all depend upon the wind for their fertilization. That is why
+they come before the leaves. And there is always wind enough to meet
+all their needs.
+
+March is a masculine month. It was named after the war god and it
+always lives up to its traditions. It has had scant courtesy from the
+literary men.
+
+    _"Ah, passing few are they who speak,
+    Wild, stormy month, in praise of thee."_
+
+'Twas a night in March when little Gavroche took his infant proteges
+into the old elephant which stood in the Place de la Bastile to
+shelter them from the cruel wind. It was in the twilight of a day in
+March, when the wind howled dismally, that Boniface Willet, in
+_Barnaby Rudge_, flattened his fat nose against the window pane and
+made one of his famous predictions. It must have been a March freshet
+when the Knight Huldebrand put Bertalda into Kuhleborn's wagon and the
+gentle Undine saved them both. And we fancy that it was a cold night
+in March when Peter stood by the fire and warmed himself.
+
+But the winds of March deserve a word of praise, as everyone knows who
+has filled his lungs with their vitalizing freshness and felt the
+earth respond to their purifying influence. They are only boisterous,
+not cruel. The specters of miasma and contagion flee before them like
+the last leaves. Many of the oaks have held a wealth of withered
+foliage all the winter but now the leaves fly almost as fast as they
+did in late October, and make a dry, rustling carpet up to your shoe
+tops. Now and again the wind gets down into this leaf-carpet and makes
+merry sport.
+
+Listen to the majestic roar of the winds in a grove of rugged oaks,
+and then again, for contrast, where the timber on the river bottom is
+all-yielding birch. It is like changing from the great _diapason_ to
+the _dulciana_ stop. In the mixed woodlands, so common in Iowa, the
+effect is even more delightful. The coarse, angular, unyielding twigs
+of the oaks give deep tones like the vibrations of the thick strings
+on the big double bass. The opposite, widespreading twigs of the ash
+sing like the cello, and the tones of the alternate spray of the
+lindens are finer, like the viola. The still smaller, opposite twigs
+of the maples murmur like the tender tones of the altos and the fine,
+yielding spray of the birches, the feathery elm and the hackberry make
+music pure and sweet as the wailing of the first violins. When the
+director of this _maestoso_ March movement signals _fortissimo_ the
+effect is sublime and the fine ear shall not fail to detect the
+overtones which come from the hop hornbeams and the hazel in the
+undergrowth below.
+
+In keeping with the majestic orchestra is the continuous noise of
+grinding ice from the river. There is a sign at the edge of the birch
+swamp which says: "Positively no trespassing allowed here"--but it is
+not necessary now, for the river has overflowed the swamp and big
+masses of ice lean up against the trunks of the birches. Out in the
+main channel the river is swiftly flowing, packed with ice floes, from
+the little clear fragments which shine like crystals, to the great
+masses as big as the side of a house, bearing upon them the
+accumulated dust and dirt and uncleanness of the winter. Pieces of
+trees, trunks and roots, cornstalks from fields along the shore, all
+are being carried seaward. In the middle of the river the prow of a
+flat boat projects upward from between two huge ice floes which have
+mashed it, like a miniature wreck in arctic seas. The best view of
+this annual ice spectacle is to look up the river and see the big
+field of broken, tumbling, crashing, grinding ice coming down.
+
+Farther down, at the narrows of the river, where the heavy timber
+shuts out the sunlight, the ice has not given way and here a gorge is
+formed. Hundreds of tons of ice are washed swiftly up to it and stop
+with a crash. The water backs up, flows over the banks and fills up
+all the summer fish ponds along the shore. Some of it forces its way
+through, foaming into a white spray. By-and-bye, under the combined
+influence of the rushing water and the ever increasing weight of the
+ice, the gorge gives way and the irresistible floes pass on with a
+mighty crash to their dissolution in the summery waters away down the
+Mississippi. After many months of shrouded death this new life of the
+river is also a symbol of the resurrection.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are other days in March so soft and beautiful that they might
+well have a place in May.
+
+    _"And in thy reign of blast and storm,
+      Smiles many a long, bright, sunny day
+    When the changed winds are soft and warm,
+      And heaven puts on the blue of May."_
+
+From the summit of a thinly-treed hill we look across a wide valley on
+the right which gradually slopes up to a high ridge three miles away.
+On the left there is a clear view for fully twenty miles, out to where
+the lavender haze hangs softly on the forest-fringed horizon. The
+plowed fields lie mellow and chocolate-hued in the sunlight and the
+russet meadows are beginning to show a faint undertone of green. The
+golden green of the willow fences which separate some of the fields
+shines from afar in the abundant light and there is a quickening
+crimson in the tops of the red maple groves around the homesteads. The
+deep blue of the high-domed sky gives a glory to the landscape. The
+few, far clouds, soft and white, float slowly in the azure sea and now
+and then approach the throne of the king of day, sending dark shadows
+chasing the sunlight over the smiling fields. When these shadows reach
+the nearer woodlands across the valley on the right it is as if a
+moving belt of dark pines was swiftly passing through the deciduous
+forest. We think of Birnam wood removing to Dunsinane, but that was
+trivial compared with this. The dark belt of shadow makes a strong and
+beautiful contrast to the reddish brown and gray of the winter woods.
+
+The river is more than bank full. Shut in on one side by the high
+ridge upon which we are standing it has spread over half a mile of
+bottom on the other side. Once more, after many months of waiting we
+rejoice in the gleam of its waters. The broad valley, which has so
+long been paved with white, is bottomed with amethyst now, the fainter
+reflection of the azure sky above. The trees which have so long stood
+comfortless again see their doubles in the waters below. The huge gray
+trunks of the water elms and the silver maples, the red rags of the
+birches and the delicate tracery of their spray, the ruby gold of the
+willows, the shining white of the sycamores, the ashen green of the
+poplars and the dark crimson of the wild rose and the red osier
+dogwood,--all these are reflected as from a vast mirror.
+
+There is not a ripple on the surface. But anon a belated ice floe
+comes down the main channel and shows how swiftly the waters are
+flowing now that they once more move "unvexed to the sea." There are
+still some masses hugging the shore. One by one they slip into the
+waters and float away,--just as a man's prejudices and delusions are
+the last to leave him after the light of truth and the warmth of love
+have set his soul free from the bondage of error and wrong.
+
+The stillness is a marked contrast to the recent roar of the winds.
+You may hear your watch ticking in your pocket. The leisurely tapping
+of a downy woodpecker sounds like the ticking of a clock in a vast
+ancestral hall. You may actually hear a squirrel running down a tree,
+twenty rods away. He paws out an acorn and begins to eat. The noise of
+your footstep seems like a profanation of holy ground. Also it
+disturbs the squirrel who scurries up to the topmost twigs of an elm
+nearly a hundred feet high. With a glass you may see his eyes shine as
+he watches you. His long red tail hangs down still and straight and
+there is not breeze enough, even up there, to stir it.
+
+Gnats and moths flit in the soft sunlight and spiders run over tree
+trunks while their single shining lines of silk are stretched among
+the hazel.
+
+Anon the bird chorus breaks out, full and strong. The winter birds
+report all present but there are a number of new voices, especially
+the warble of the robin, the tremulous, confiding "sol-si, sol-si" of
+the bluebird and the clear call of the phoebe. The robins are thick
+down in the birch swamps, on the islands among the last year's
+knot-weed. You may tell them at a distance by their trim, military
+manner of walking, and if you wish you may get close enough to them to
+take their complete description. And, by the way, how many can
+describe this common bird, the color of his head and bill, his back
+and tail, and the exact shade of his breast. Is there any white on
+him, and if so, where?
+
+After the ice is out of the rivers the bird-lover is kept busy. In the
+early sunny morning the duet of the robins and the meadow larks is
+better than breakfast. March usually gives us the hermit thrush and
+the ruby-and golden-crowned kinglets; the song, field, fox, white
+throated, Savannah and Lincoln sparrows; the meadow lark, the bronzed
+grackle and the cowbird; the red-winged, the yellow-head and the rusty
+blackbirds; the wood pewee and the olive-sided flycatcher; the flicker
+and the sap-sucker, the mourning dove and several of the water fowl.
+Last week--the first week in March--a golden eagle paused in his
+migration to sit awhile on a fence post at the side of a timber road.
+Two men got near enough to see the color of his feathers and then one
+of them, with a John Burroughs instinct, took a shot at him. He
+missed; there was a spread of the great wings and the big bird
+resumed his journey northward.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the shallow creek which ripples over the many-hued gravel there is
+much of interest. The frog sits on the bank as we approach and goes
+into the water with a splash. In the quiet little bayous the minnows
+are lively, and tracks upon the soft mud show that the mink has been
+watching them. A pile of neatly cleaned clam shells is evidence that
+the muskrat has had a feast. There is a huge clam, partly opened, at
+arm's length from the shore. We fish it out and pry it open farther;
+out comes the remains of the esculent clam, and we almost jump when it
+is followed by a live and healthy crawfish.
+
+It never pays to be a clam. It is very meet, right, and the bounden
+duty of every quadruped, biped and decapod to prey upon the clam.
+
+Farther down is a sandy hollow which was deep under water in the great
+January freshet. That freshet deposited a new layer of sand and also
+bushels of clam and snail shells of all sizes and species. They lie so
+thick they may be taken up by the shovelful. Two or three dead fish
+are also found. What a fine fossiliferous stratum will be found here
+about a hundred million years from now!
+
+In March the rains and the melting of the "robin snows" soften the
+leathery lichens and their painted circles on the trees and rocks vary
+from olive gray and green to bright red and yellow. They revel in the
+moist gray days. And the mosses which draw a tapestry of tender velvet
+around the splintered rocks in the timber quarries and strangely veil
+the ruin of the fallen forest kings,--how much they add to the beauty
+of the landscape in the interval between the going of the snow and the
+coming of the grass! The rich dark green of the common hair-cap
+clothes many a bank with beauty, the dense tufts of the broom moss
+hide the ruin and assuage the grief where an exalted forest monarch
+has been cast down by the storm. The silvery Bryum shows abundantly on
+the sandy fields and the thick green velvet mats of the Anomodon creep
+up the bases of the big water elms in the swamps. The delicate
+branchlets of the beautiful fern moss are recompense for a day's
+search, and the bright yellow-green Schreber's Hypnum, with its red
+stems, is a rich rug for reluctant feet. The moist rocks down which
+the water trickles into the ravine below are stained green and orange
+by the glossy Entodon. These patient mosses cover wounds in the
+landscape gently as tender thoughts soothe aching voids left by the
+loss of those we love. They lead us into the most entrancing bits of
+the woodland scenery--shaded rills, flowing springs, dashing cascades,
+fairy glens, and among the castellated rocks of the dark ravines.
+Their parts are so exquisitely perfect, almost they persuade the
+nature-lover to degenerate into a mere naturalist, walking through the
+woods seeing nothing but sporophytes through his lens, just as a rare
+book sometimes causes the bibliophile to become a bibliomaniac,
+reading nothing but catalogues. It is a credit to be a bibliomaniac
+provided one is a bibliophile as well. And the best moss naturalists
+are they whose hearts respond to the enthusiasm in Ruskin's closing
+paragraphs of _Leaves Motionless_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The yielding odorous soil is promiseful after its stubborn hardness of
+winter months and we watch it eagerly for the first herbaceous growth.
+Often this is one of the fern allies, the field horsetail. The
+appearance of its warm, mushroom-colored, fertile stems is one of the
+first signs of returning spring, and its earliest stems are found in
+dry sandy places. The buds containing its fruiting cones have long
+been all complete, waiting for the first warm day, and when the start
+is finally made the tubered rootstocks, full of nutriment, send up the
+slender stem at the rate of two inches a day.
+
+During the last week in the month, when the dark maroon flowers of the
+elm and the crimson blossom of the red maples are giving a ruddy glow
+to the woods with the catkins of the cotton-woods, the aspens and the
+red birches adding to the color harmony, we shall look for the fuzzy
+scape of the hepatica, bringing up through the leaf carpet of the
+woods its single blue, white or pinkish flower, closely wrapped in
+warm gray furs. At the same time, perhaps a day or two earlier, the
+white oblong petals of the dwarf trillium, or wake-robin, will gleam
+in the rich woods. And some sunny day in the same period we shall see
+a gleam of gold in a sheltered nook, the first flower of the
+dandelion. A few days later and the light purple pasque-flower will
+unfold and gem the flush of new life on the northern prairies. Even
+should the last week of the month be unseasonably cold we shall not
+have long to wait. Yet
+
+         _"----a little while
+    And air, soil, wave, suffused shall be in softness, bloom and
+            growth; a thousand forms shall rise
+    From these dead clods and chills, as from low burial graves,
+    Thine eyes, ears,--all thy best attributes,--all that takes
+            cognizance of natural beauty,
+    Shall wake and fill. Thou shalt perceive the simple shows,
+            the delicate miracles of earth
+    Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents and flowers;
+    With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their songs--the
+            flitting bluebird;
+    For such scenes the annual play brings on."_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Some Winter Days in Iowa, by Frederick John Lazell
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME WINTER DAYS IN IOWA ***
+
+***** This file should be named 18174.txt or 18174.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/1/7/18174/
+
+Produced by Brian Sogard, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+