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 cañon. 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 cañon 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