WINTER VOICES

Out of her sleep nature yet gives forth voices betokening that life abides beneath the semblance of death, that her warm heart still beats under the white shroud that infolds her rigid breast.

A smothered tinkle as of muffled bells comes up from the streams through their double roofing of snow and ice, and the frozen pulse of the trees complains of its thralldom with a resonant twang as of a strained cord snapped asunder.

Beneath their frozen plains, the lakes bewail their imprisonment with hollow moans awakening a wild and mournful chorus of echoes from sleeping shores that answer now no caress of ripples nor angry stroke of waves nor dip and splash of oar and paddle.

The breeze stirs leafless trees and shaggy evergreens to a murmur that is sweet, if sadder than they gave it in the leafy days of summer, when it bore the perfume of flowers and the odor of green fields, and one may imagine the spirit of springtime and summer lingers among the naked boughs, voicing memory and hope.

Amid all the desolation of their woodland haunts the squirrels chatter their delight in windless days of sunshine, and scoff at biting cold and wintry blasts. The nuthatch winds his tiny trumpet, the titmouse pipes his cheery note, the jay tries the innumerable tricks of his unmusical voice, and from their rollicking flight athwart the wavering slant of snowflakes drifts the creaking twitter of buntings.

The sharp, resonant strokes of the woodman's axe and the groaning downfall of the monarchs that it lays low, the shouts of teamsters, the occasional report of a gun, the various sounds of distant farmstead life, the jangle of sleigh bells on far-off highways, the rumbling roar of a railroad train rushing and panting along its iron path, and the bellowing of its far-echoed signals, all proclaim how busily affairs of life and pleasure still go on while the summer-wearied earth lies wrapped in her winter sleep.

Night, stealing upon her in dusky pallor, under cloudy skies, or silvering her face with moonbeams and starlight, brings other and wilder voices. Solemnly the unearthly trumpet of the owl resounds from his woodland hermitage, the fox's gasping bark, wild and uncanny, marks at intervals his wayward course across the frozen fields on some errand of love or freebooting, and, swelling and falling with puff and lapse of the night wind, as mournful and lonesome as the voice of a vagrant spirit, comes from the mountain ridges the baying of a hound, hunting alone and unheeded, while his master basks in the comfort of his fireside.