ty, truth and beauty.

Soon the silence is broken. Curiously, the first sound you hear comes
from advanced civilization, the rumble of a train fifteen miles away.
On a still morning like this one can hardly stand five full minutes on
any spot in the whole state of Iowa without hearing the sound of a
train. There are no more trackless prairies, no more terrors of
blizzards. Pioneer days have passed away. The railroads have brought
security, comfort, prosperity, intelligence, and the best of the
world's work, physical and mental, fresh at the door every morning.

Whirr! There goes a ruffed grouse from the snow, scarce a rod ahead.
In a moment, up goes another. Too bad to rout them from their bed
under the roots of a fallen tree. Farther on a rabbit scurries from
another log. There is his "form" fresh in the snow.

The river, away down below, begins to boom and crack. The ice is like
the tight head of a big bass drum, but the drummer is inside and the
sound comes muffled. The frost is the peg which tightens all the
strings of earth and makes them vibrant. The tinkle of sleigh bells on
the wagon road fully a mile away comes with peculiar clearness.

When the sun is more than half way from the horizon to the meridian,
Nature begins to wake up. A chickadee emerges from his hole in the
decaying trunk of a red oak and cheeps softly as he flies to the
branch of a slippery elm. His merry "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" brings
others of his race, and away they all go down to the red birches on
the river bottom. The metallic quanks of a pair of nuthatches call
attention to the upper branches of a big white oak. A chickadee and
one of the nuthatches see a tempting morsel at the same time. A
spiteful peck from nuthatch leaves him master of the morsel and the
field. But the chickadee does not care. He flies down and spies a
stalk of golden-rod above the snow on which there is a round object
looking like a small onion. Chickadee doesn't know that this is the
spherical gall of the _trypeta solidaginis_, but he does know that it
contains a fat white grub. He knows, too, that there is a beveled
passage leading to a cell in the center and that the outer end of this
passage is protected by a membrane window. After some balancing and
pirouetting he smashes the window with his bill, runs his long tongue
down the passageway, gulps the grub and away he flies to join his
comrades down in the birches, chirping gaily as he goes.

Downy woodpecker "