wide white pages written all over by the feet of wild things.
Then the sun would shine again, and I knew that the records were
washed clean, and the hard-packed leaves as innocent of footmarks
as the beach where plover feed when a great wave has chased them
away. On the twentieth a change came. Outside the snow fell
heavily, two days and a night; inside, books were packed away,
professors said Merry Christmas, and students were scattering,
like a bevy of flushed quail, to all points of the compass for
the holidays. The afternoon of the twenty-first found me again in
my room under the eaves of the old farmhouse.

Before dark I had taken a wide run over the hills and through the
woods to the place of my summer camp. How wonderful it all was!
The great woods were covered deep with their pure white mantle;
not a fleck, not a track soiled its even whiteness; for the last
soft flakes were lingering in the air, and fox and grouse and
hare and lucivee were still keeping the storm truce, hidden deep
in their coverts. Every fir and spruce and hemlock had gone to
building fairy grottoes as the snow packed their lower branches,
under which all sorts of wonders and beauties might be hidden, to
say nothing of the wild things for whom Nature had been building
innumerable tents of white and green as they slept. The silence
was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder
Worker. Even the trout brook, running black as night among its
white-capped boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work,
between massive banks of feathery white and green, had stopped
its idle chatter and tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only
the Angelus could express the wonder of the world.

As I came back softly in the twilight a movement in an evergreen