In New England Fields and Woods

gbirds have come to stay in spite of inhospitable weather that seems for days to set the calendar back a month, the woods invite you more than the fields. There nature is

there the tawny mat beneath is uplifted by the struggling plant life below it or pierced through by an underthrust of a sprouting seed. There is a promise of bloom in blushing arbutus buds, a promise even now fulfilled by the first squirrelcups just out of their furry bracts

have grown redder and plumper under every snow of the winter. This smoothly rounded mound and the hollow scooped beside it, brimful now of amber, sun-warmed water, mark t

m sprawled along the bottom on the leaf paving of their own color. As you cast a casual glance on your prospective seat, carelessly noting the mingling of many hues, the brightness of

not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion-a motion that charms us in the undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded

uge mouthful of twice or thrice the ordinary diameter of his gullet. If you chance to witness his slow and painful gorging of a frog, you hear a cry of distress that might be uttered with equal cause by victim or devourer. When he has fully entered upon the business of reawakened life, many a young field-m

more mischievous he is. The better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the bison and the I

egend written on his gilded mail, "Evil to him who evil thinks." If this sunny patch of earth is not wide enough for you to share