Everyone’s almost asleep
Waiting for the Spring’s first peep.
Chilly Mr. North Wind blows from his home at the North Pole, making his snow horses whirl over the Sunny Meadow and along the Old Rail Fence.
The Bubbling Brook is covered with a coat of ice, and the Farmer’s Boy skates across the Old Duck Pond. But Granddaddy Bullfrog doesn’t hear him, for he is sound asleep in the mud ’way down deep where the ice never forms.
Timmy Meadowmouse makes little tunnels through the snow, for he is too small to walk over the drifts. But Danny Fox, that sly old robber, sneaks along the bare places so as to leave no footprints to show where he has been.
Sometimes he turns to the Shady Forest, and sometimes to the farm, where Cocky Doodle and Henny Penny prune their feathers on the sunny side of the High Haystack.
The Weathercock swings to and fro on the Big Red Barn and wishes it were Spring.
Busy Beaver swims about under the ice in the Forest Pond, coming back to his little house, whose front door is deep down where the water never freezes. In the upper room he has stored away twigs and things to eat till Mr. Merry Sun melts the ice and tells the flowers to bloom again.
All the birds have gone south except a few. Charlie Chickadee and Jimmy Junko, though, don’t mind the chilly weather. They flutter here and there, eating the dry seeds that still cling to the tall meadow grass, or the dry berries in the Old Bramble Patch.