into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife
would brush down cobwebs; so that the released limbs straighten
up like a man who has gotten out of debt, and almost say to you,
joyfully, "Now, then, we are all right again!" This done, she
begins to hang up soft new curtains at the forest windows, and to
spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such
as no mortal looms could ever have woven. And then, at last, she
sends out invitations through the South, and even to some tropical
lands, for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The
invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May,
and by June her house is full of visitors.

Not the eyes alone love Nature in March. Every other sense hies
abroad. My tongue hunts for the last morsel of wet snow on the
northern root of some aged oak. As one goes early to a concert-hall
with a passion even for the preliminary tuning of the musicians,
so my ear sits alone in the vast amphitheatre of Nature and waits
for the earliest warble of the blue-bird, which seems to start up
somewhere behind the heavenly curtains. And the scent of spring,
is it not the first lyric of the nose--that despised poet of the
senses?

But this year I have hardly glanced at the small choice edition of
Nature's spring verses. This by reason of the on-coming Cobbs, at
the mere mention of whom I feel as though I were plunged up to my
eyes in a vat of the prosaic. Some days ago workmen went into the
house and all but scoured the very memory of Jacob off the face of
the earth. Then there has been need to quiet Mrs. Walters.

Mrs. Walters does not get into our best society; so that the town