Four centuries later, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego anticipated Emerson's advice about eating bread and pulse at rich men's tables. The historian tells us that they were men skilful in all wisdom, cunning in knowledge, and understanding science. Possessing such wisdom, Daniel knew it would be easy to mix up the wicked elders who plotted against the virtue of the fair Susanna by asking them a question of botany. One said he saw her under a mastick tree and the other under a holm tree. This gave Shakespeare that fine line in The Merchant of Venice, "A Daniel come to judgment; yea, a Daniel." But in these latter days we rarely read the story of Susanna, and Shakespeare's line is not understood by one play-goer in fifty.
When the diminutive Zaccheus climbed into a shade tree which graced a town lot in Jericho he gave the translators for "the Most High and Mighty Prince James" another puzzle, for they put him on record as going up into a sycamore tree. We had always supposed that this was because the sycamore's habit of shedding its bark made smooth climbing for Zaccheus. But scientific commentators tell us now that it was not a sycamore tree, but a hybridized fig-mulberry!
But all this is digression. The best time to begin keeping that New Year's nature resolution is now, when the oaks are seen in all their rugged majesty, when the elms display their lofty, graceful, vase-like forms, and when every other tree of the forest exhibits its peculiar beauty of trunk, and branch, and twig. Often January is a most propitious month for the tenderfoot nature-lover. Such was the year which has just passed. During the first part of the month the weather was almost springlike; so bright and balmy that a robin was seen in an apple-tree, and the brilliant plumage of the cardinal was observed in this latitude. Green leaves, such as wild geranium, strawberry and speedwell, were to be found in abundance beneath their covering of fallen forest leaves. Scouring rushes vied with evergreen ferns in arresting the attention of the rambler. In one sheltered spot a clump of catnip was found, fresh, green, and aromatic, as if it were July instead of January.
Sunday, the sixth, was a day of rare beauty and enticement. Well might the recording angel forgive the nature lover who forgot the promises made for him by his sponsors that he should "hear sermons," and who fared forth into the woods instead, first reciting "The groves were God's first temples," and then softly singing, "When God invites, how blest the day!"
They err who think the winter woods void of life and color. Pause for a moment on the broad open flood-plain of the river, the winter fields and meadows stretching away in gentle slopes on either side. There are but few trees, but they have had room for full development and are noble specimens. All is gaiety. A blue-jay screams from a broad-topped white ash which is so full of winged seeds that it looks like a mass of foliage. The sable-robed king of the winter woods, the American crow, in the full vigor of his three-score years, maybe, (he lives to be a hundred) caws lustily from the bare white branches of a big sycamore, that queer anomaly of the forest which disrobes itself for the winter. The merry chickadees divide their time between the rustling, ragged bark of the red birches and the withered heads of heath-aster and blue vervain below. In the one they get the meat portion of their midday meal, and in the other the cereal foods. No wonder they are sleek and joyous.
A few steps farther and we leave this broad alluvial bottom to enter the cañon through which the river, ages ago, began to cut its course. These ridges of limestone, loess and drift rise a hundred feet or more above the level of the plain from which the river suddenly turns aside. They are thickly covered with timber. There is no angel with a flaming sword to keep you from passing into this winter paradise! The river bank is lined with pussy willows; they gleam in the sunshine like copper. Farther back there are different varieties of dogwood, some with delicate green twigs and some a cherry red. The wild rose and the raspberry vines add their glossy purplish and cherry red stems to the color combination, and a contrast is afforded by the silvery gray bark of stray aspens. A still softer and more beautiful shade of silver gray is seen in the big hornet's nest of last year which still hangs suspended from a low sugar maple. On all of these the sunlight plays and makes a wondrous color symphony. "Truly the light is sweet and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." To be sure, this colorful arrangement of the stems and twigs is not brilliant, like the flaming vermilion blossoms of the Lobelia cardinalis in August, the orange yellow of the rudbeckias in September, or the wondrous blue of the fringed gentian in early October. It is more like the delicate tints and shadings of an arts and crafts exhibition, stained leather, hammered copper and brass, art canvas, and ancient illuminated initials in monks' missals. The tempered winter sunlight is further softened by the trees; as it illuminates the soft red rags of the happy old birch it seems sublimated, almost sanctified and spiritual, like that which filters through rich windows in cathedrals, and makes a real halo around the heads of sweet-faced saints.
There are strange sounds for January. All the winter birds are doing their share in the chorus and orchestra; crows, jays, woodpeckers, nut-hatches, juncos, tree-sparrows. But suddenly a woodpecker begins a new sound,—his vernal drumming! Not the mere tap, tap, tap, in quest of insects, but the love-call drumming of the nidification season, nearly three months ahead of time.