squirrels and blue jays which fail to find many of their buried acorns
and nuts. The big three-valved balloons of the bladdernut can sail
either in the air, on the water, 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