Winter

But on the night before this particular Christmas every creature of the woods that could stir was up and stirring; for over the old snow was falling swiftly, silently, a soft, f...

The situation was serious enough for the two boys. It was not a large fortune, but it was their whole fortune, that straggled along the slushy road in the shape of five hundred...

The snow had melted from the river meadows, leaving them flattened, faded, and stained with mud--a dull, dreary waste in the gray February. I had stopped beside a tiny bundle of...

I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and fluttered off among the naked bushes--...

You want no gun, no club, no game-bag, no steel trap, no snare when you go hunting the snow. Rubber boots or overshoes, a good, stout stick to help you up the ridges, a pair of...

If you are a New Englander, or a Northwesterner, then, probably, you have never pulled a ’possum out of his hollow stump or from under some old rail-pile, as I have done, many a...

The December rain was falling down, down, down, as if the drops were lead instead of water. The December sky, if you could call it sky, had settled down, down, down, as if it to...

The February freshet had come. We had been expecting it, but no one along Maurice River had ever seen so wild and warm and ominous a spring storm as this. So sudden and complete...

One of the very interesting events in my out-of-door year is the February freshet. Perhaps you call it the February _thaw_. That is all it could be called this year; and, in fac...

According to the almanac March 21st is the last day of winter. The almanac is not always to be trusted--not for hay weather, or picnic weather, or sailing weather; but you can a...

The first snowstorm! I would not miss seeing the first snowstorm, not if I had to climb up to my high, tarry, smoky roof in the city and lie down on my back, as I once did, in o...

You should hear the three great silences of winter: the wide, sudden silence that falls at twilight on the coming of the first winter frost; the smothered hush that waits the br...

You should go skating--crawling, I ought to say--over a pond of glare ice this winter. Take the pond you are most familiar with. Go early on a bright day, before any skater arri...

“It must be a lovely place _in the summer_!” the dull and irritating often say to me, referring to my home in the country. What they mean is, of course, “How wretched a place th...

Let this chapter be read very close to the Christmas recess, when your children’s minds are full of Christmas thoughts. This unconventional turn to the woods, this thought of Ch...

I should like to repeat here the suggestions in “The Fall of the Year” for this corresponding chapter. I will repeat only: “that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is...

I believe this to be one of the most important chapters in the volume, dark and terrible as its lesson may appear. But grim, dark death itself is not so dark as fear of the trut...

Poem and chapter ought mutually to help each other. Read the chapter slowly, explaining clearly as you go on, making it finally plain that this mere “atom” of life is greater th...

If you have at hand “The Fall of the Year,” read again the suggestions on page 112 for the chapter on “Things to See this Fall,” making use of this chapter as you did of that (1...

There is a three-pronged point to this chapter: (1) the empty birds’ nests are not things to mourn over. The birds are safe and warm down south; and they will build fresh, clean...

Make this chapter, as far as you can, the one in the volume for most intensive study. Show the pupils how the study of animal life is connected with geology, tell them of the re...

Do all that you can to teach the signs of the zodiac, the days of the seasons, and all the doings of the astronomical year. All that old lore of the skies is in danger of being...

Make a point of going into the winter woods and fields, taking the pupils as often as possible with you. It may be impossible for your city children to get the rare chance of gl...

This chapter and the next go together--this for the lover of wild life, the next for the lover of adventure. The spring freshet is one of the most interesting of the year of day...

This herding and driving of turkeys to market is common in other sections of the country, particularly in Kentucky. I have told the story (as told to me by one who saw the flock...