lver and jewels. And then
the glory, dazzling beyond all words, when the sun rose and shone upon
it!

Before sunrise I was out. Soon the jumping flight and cheery
good-morning of a downy woodpecker led me to an old field with
scattered evergreen clumps. There is no better time for a quiet peep
at the birds than the morning after a snow-storm, and no better place
than the evergreens. If you can find them at all (which is not
certain, for they have mysterious ways of disappearing before a
storm), you will find them unusually quiet, and willing to bear your
scrutiny indifferently, instead of flying off into deeper coverts.

I had scarcely crossed the wall when I stopped at hearing a new bird
song, so amazingly sweet that it could only be a Christmas message,
yet so out of place that the listener stood doubting whether his ears
were playing him false, wondering whether the music or the landscape
would not suddenly vanish as an unreal thing. The song was
continuous--a soft melodious warble, full of sweetness and suggestion;
but suggestion of June meadows and a summer sunrise, rather than of
snow-packed evergreens and Christmastide. To add to the unreality, no
ear could tell where the song came from; its own muffled quality
disguised the source perfectly. I searched the trees in front; there
was no bird there. I looked behind; there was no place for a bird to
sing. I remembered the redstart, how he calls sometimes from among the
rocks, and refuses to show himself, and runs and hides when you look
for him. I searched the wall; but not a bird track marked the snow.
All the while the wonderful carol went on, now in the air, now close
beside me, growing more and more bewildering as I listened. It took me
a good half-hour to locate the sound; then I understood.

Near me was a solitary fir tree with a bushy top. The bird, whoever he
was, had gone to sleep up there, close against the trunk, as birds do,
for protection. During the night the soft snow gathered thicker and
thicker upon the flexible branches. Their tips bent with the weight
till they touched the trunk below, forming a green bower, about which
the snow packed all night long, till it was completely closed in. The
bird was a prisoner inside, and singing as the morning sun shone in
through the walls of his prison-house.

As I listened, delighted with the carol and the minstrel's novel
situation, a mass of snow, loosened by the sun, slid from the snow
bower, and a pine-