"The foodless wilds
Pour forth their brown inhabitants."

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens,
even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and
Labrador; and for our Esquimaux and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians,
Novazemblaites, and Spitzbergeners, are there not the ice-cutter and
wood-chopper, the fox, musk-rat, and mink?

Still, in the midst of the arctic day we may trace the summer to its
retreats and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over
the brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the
submarine cottages of the caddice-worms, the larvae of the Plicipennes.
Their small cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of
flags, sticks, grass, and withered leaves, shells and pebbles, inform
and color like the wrecks which strew the bottom, now drifting along
over the pebbly bottom, now whirling in tiny eddies and dashing down
steep falls, or sweeping rapidly along with the current, or else
swaying to and fro at the end of some grass-blade or root. Anon they
will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling up the stems of
plants or to the surface like gnats, as perfect insects henceforth,
flutter over the surface of the water or sacrifice their short lives in
the flame of our candle at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs
are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast
with the white ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have
already been abroad. The sun rises as proudly over such a glen as over
the valley of the Seine or Tiber, and it seems the residence of a pure
and self-subsistent valor such as they never witnessed, which never
knew defeat or fear. Here reign the simplicity and purity of a