hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there,
doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the
inclement season. Emerson has put this fact into his poem on "The
Humble-Bee":--

"When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous."

In early August of the past year I saw a queen bumblebee quickly
enter a small hole on the edge of the road where there was no
nest. It was probably her winter quarters.

If one could take the cover off the ground in the fields and
woods in winter, or have some magic ointment put upon his eyes
that would enable him to see through opaque substances, how many
curious and interesting forms of life he would behold in the
ground beneath his feet as he took his winter walk--life with the
fires banked, so to speak, and just keeping till spring. He would
see the field crickets in their galleries in the ground in a
dormant state, all their machinery of life brought to a
standstill by the cold. He would see the ants in their hills and
in their tunnels in decaying trees and logs, as inert as the soil
or the wood they inhabit. I have chopped many a handful of the
big black ants out of a log upon my woodpile in winter, stiff,
but not dead, with the frost, and brought them in by the fire to
see their vital forces set going again by the heat. I have
brought in the grubs of borers and the big fat grubs of beetles,
turned out of their winter beds in old logs by my axe and frozen
like ice-cream, and have seen the spark of life rekindle in them
on the hearth.

With this added visual power, one would see the wood frogs and
the hylas in their winter beds but a few inches beneath the moss
and leaf-mould, one here and one there, cold, inert, biding their
time. I dug a wood frog out one December and found him not
frozen, though the soil around him was full of frost; he was
alive but not frisky. A friend of mine once found one in the
woods sitting upon the snow one day in early winter. She carried
him home with her, and he burrowed in the soil of her flower-pot
and came out all right in the spring. What brought him out upon
the snow in December one would like to know.

One would see the tree-frogs in the cavities of old trees,
wrapped in their winter sleep--which is yet not a sleep, but
suspended animation. Whe