er, or over the frozen snow. The pretty
clusters of the wild yam, seen climbing over the hazelbrush in the
rich winter woods, have two ways of navigating in the wind; either
the three-sided, papery capsule floats as a whole, or it splits
through the winged angles and then the flat seeds with their
membranaceous wings have a chance to flutter a foot or two away where
haply they may find a square inch of unoccupied soil. The desmodium,
the bidens, the agrimony and the cocklebur, which stick to your
clothes even as late as February, are only using you as a Moses to
lead their children to their promised land. These herb stalks above
the snow, the corymbose heads of the yarrow, the spikes of the
self-heal, the crosiers of the golden-rod, the panicles of the asters,
the racemes of the Indian tobacco, the knotted threads of the blue
vervain and the plantain, the miniature mandarin temples of the
peppergrass--all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to
be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth's easter April
mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and
the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and
wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of an eager,
expectant life.

* * * * *

The snow is winter's great gift to states like Iowa. He is unwise who
complains of the tender, protecting, nourishing, fructifying mantle
of immaculate white. Where the snow lies deepest in winter, there
shall you find the greatest flush of new life in the spring. Down
under the snow Nature's chemical laboratory is at work. Take a stick
and dig under the thick white blanket into the black soil. Here are
bulbs and buds, corms and tubers, rootstalks and rhizomes, which were
pumped full of starch and albumen in the hot days of last August. So
far as modern science is able to tell, chemical changes are in
constant progress in all these forms of underground life, preparing
for the coming glory of the living green. Nature never dies. She
scarcely sleeps.

Tracks on the all-revealing snow tell of an equal abundance of animal
life. These rabbit tracks, scarcely two feet apart, tell how happily
bunny was going. But farther on a dog came across at an angle and gave
chase. The tracks are now farther apart, three feet, four feet, as up
bunny goes to his burrow under the shelving rock. One last bound,
nearly five feet, and he was safe. That was once whe