down five or six inches, turned
head upward, and there they were, each a conical brown pupa that
bore little resemblance to the naked green caterpillars that had
gone down into the earth a week before. Barring the accident of my
spade, which neither could foresee, they were safe from cold and
enemies. The ground would freeze solid around them, but that
instead of harming them would simply put the seal of safety on
their abode. Nor were they dead things to be resurrected by the
Gabriel horn of spring. When I poked them they wriggled with quite
surprising vigor, showing that they were very much alive and
keenly conscious. They were not even asleep, else their jump at a
touch would not have been so prompt.

[Illustration: The Pines in Winter]

The frost goes deepest in the densely compacted earth, probably
because of the density; the fewer the air cells the better the
conductor. In fluffy soil, especially in the peaty margins of the
pond where the earth granules are large and loose and there is
much moisture, freezing produces a singular and beautiful result.
The ice seems to crystallize away from the peat in which the water
was ensponged, not in a compact body nor yet in feathery crystals,
either of which one might expect, but in closely parallel, upright
cylinders from the size of a knitting needle to that of a slim
lead pencil. These are often several inches long and stand erect
at the surface by the thousand, touching but not cohering, ready
to crumble to fragments at the pressure of the foot but shielding
the peat below from the cold. The ice on the pond may be solid
enough to bear you, but when you step on this peaty edge you go
down into the liquid mud beneath. Here you have reproduced in
fragile miniature the same result as happened at the Giant's
Causeway on the sea margin at the northeast corner of Ireland.
There a long vein of once liquid basalt, freezing suddenly ages
ago, left a great ridge of close-packed, vertical rock crystals
running out an unknown distance into the sea.

*****

With the good old rock-ribbed New England earth in winter quarters
and the surface vocal with Jeremiahs clamoring for snow, it had to
come. The incantations of these raised a witch whirl in that
mysterious source of all our storms, the region along the tropic
of Capricorn, in the Gulf of Mexico. Up the coast it came, with
the weather bureau flying storm flags in its honor from Palm Beach
to the Penobscot, boring into the fr