powder just
spilled there. Or you may see a winged insect in the air. On the
selfsame day the grass in the spring run and the catkins on the alders
will have started a little; and if you look sharply, while passing
along some sheltered nook or grassy slope where the sunshine lies warm
on the bare ground, you will probably see a grasshopper or two. The
grass hatches out under the snow, and why should not the grasshopper?
At any rate, a few such hardy specimens may be found in the latter
part of our milder winters wherever the sun has uncovered a sheltered
bit of grass for a few days, even after a night of ten or twelve
degrees of frost. Take them in the shade, and let them freeze stiff as
pokers, and when thawed out again they will hop briskly. And yet, if a
poet were to put grasshoppers in his winter poem, we should require
pretty full specifications of him, or else fur to clothe them with.
Nature will not be cornered, yet she does many things in a corner and
surreptitiously. She is all things to all men; she has whole truths,
half truths, and quarter truths, if not still smaller fractions. The
careful observer finds this out sooner or later. Old fox-hunters will
tell you, on the evidence of their own eyes, that there is a black fox
and a silver-gray fox, two species, but there are not; the black fox
is black when coming toward you or running from you, and silver gray
at point-blank view, when the eye penetrates the fur; each separate
hair is gray the first half and black the last. This is a sample of
nature's half truths.

Which are our sweet-scented wild flowers? Put your nose to every
flower you pluck, and you will be surprised how your list will swell
the more you smell. I plucked some wild blue violets one day, the
_ovata_ variety of the _sagittata_, that had a faint perfume of sweet
clover, but I never could find another that had any odor. A pupil
disputed with his teacher about the hepatica, claiming in opposition
that it was sweet-scented. Some hepaticas are sweet-scented and some
are not, and the perfume is stronger some seasons than others. After
the unusually severe winter of 1880-81, the variety of hepatica called
the sharp-lobed was markedly sweet in nearly every one of the hundreds
of specimens I examined. A handful of them exhaled a most delicious
perfume. The white ones that season were largely in the ascendant; and
probably the white specimens of both varieties, one season with
another, will oftenest