"About as many as you see in summer. Because you hear them you fancy
you see them."

"But there is so little to hide them in winter."

"Little is wanted to hide our dusky creatures."

"They must have a hard time of it in frost and snow."

"Oh! I don't know," returned George. "They enjoy life on the whole,
I believe. It ain't such a very bad sort of a world as some people
would have it. Nature is cruel enough in some of her arrangements,
it can't be denied. She don't scruple to carry out her plans. It is
nothing to her that for the life of one great monster of a
high-priest, millions upon millions of submissive little fishes
should be sacrificed; and then if anybody come within the teeth of
her machinery, don't she mangle him finely--with her fevers and her
agues and her convulsions and consumptions and what not? But still,
barring her own necessities, and the consequences of man's ignorance
and foolhardiness, she is on the whole rather a good-natured old
woman, and scatters a deal of tolerably fair enjoyment around her."

"One WOULD think the birds must be happy in summer, at least, to
hear them sing," corroborated Helen.

"Yes, or to see them stripping a hawthorn bush in winter--always
provided the cat or the hawk don't get hold of them. With that
nature does not trouble herself. Well, it's soon over--with all of
us, and that's a comfort. If men would only get rid of their cats