“Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here.” And with a few dexterous cuts he soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of pitcher-plants, the strange, almost uncanny, leaves filled with muddy water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted by a master potter’s hand.
Now at last I fully understood. Now I could see what those boys had been seeing with their inward eyes all the time. Now I had faith, too. But how late! The bouquet of flowers was now full.
We wrapped the wonderful pitcher-plant carefully in newspapers, and put it into the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerfully, and as full of joy in the season, as we could possible have been in June.
No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June. January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chilblains, frozen water-pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and automobile-troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in June. It is so in Delaware and Texas and Oregon, too.
What I was saying is that we started home all abloom with our pitcher-plants and goldthread and partridge-berry and holly and glowing black alder, and all aglow inside with our vigorous tramp, and with the gray grave beauty of the landscape, and with the stern joy of meeting and beating the cold, and with the signs of life—of the cozy muskrats in their lodge beneath the ice-cap on the meadow; with the hairy woodpecker in his deep warm hole in the heart of a tree; with the red warm berries in our basket; with the chirping, the capable, the conquering chickadee accompanying us and singing,
“For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin;
And polar frost my form defied,
Made of the air that blows outside.”
And actually as we came over the bleak meadow, one of the boys said that he thought he heard a song-sparrow singing! And I said I thought the pussy-willows by the brook had opened a little since we had passed them coming out! And we all declared that the weather had changed, and that there were signs of a break-up. But the thermometer stood at fifteen above zero when we got home—one degree colder than when we started!