FOR two days the mad March winds have been blowing a fifty-mile gale, setting all the woodland crazy. No wonder the March hare is mad. He lives in Bedlam. No sooner does he squat comfortably in his form, his fair fat belly with round apple-tree bark lined, topped off with wee green sprigs of rash but succulent spring herbs from the brookside, ready to contemplate nature with all the philosophy which such a condition engenders, than the form rises in the air and its component leaves skitter through the wood and over the hill out of sight, leaving him denuded.
The usually dignified and gentle trees howl like beagles on his trail. The protecting scrub oaks, gone mad, too, dab and flip at him till he gets fidgety with thoughts of horned owls, and things rattle down out of the sky as if he were being pelted with buckshot. All these matters get on his nerves after a little, and if he sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy, there is small blame to him. Even man, whose mental girth and weight are supposed to be ballast sufficient against all buffetings, going forth on such a day needs the buttons of his composure well sewed on or he will find it ripped from him like the hare’s form and sent skittering down the lea along with his hat, while he himself bolts here and there fighting phantoms and objurgating the unseen.
Mad March winds are a good test of stability of soul. He who can stand their weltings with serenity, can watch his
He sets his cotton-tail white flag at half mast from fear, and goes whooping through the brush in a frenzy
un-anchored personal belongings go mad with the March hare and still thrid the sombre boskage of the wood with sunny thought and no venom beneath his tongue, ought to be President. Even the New York papers could not make him bring suit.
And after the two days of gale how sweet the serenity that came to the thrashed and winnowed pastures and woodland. I fancy it all feeling like a boy at school who, after being soundly flogged, gets back to the soothing calm of his accustomed seat. There is a gentle joy about that feeling that, as many of us know, has neither alloy nor equal. The whole woodland, thus spanked and put away to cool, feels the winter of its discontent vanishing behind it and has no room in its heart for aught but the peace and joy of regeneration.
The gale began to fail during the second day and before midnight it was dead; thus short-lived is frenzy. I do not know now if those last gentle sighs were those of the wind in sorrow of its misdeeds, thus on its death-bed repentant, or those of the trees, themselves given a chance to sleep at last after a forty-hour fight for their lives. In the threshing and winnowing of the woodland none but the physically fit may survive. Oaks that have held their last year’s leaves lovingly on the twig had to let them go like the veriest chaff, and all twigs and limbs that have been weakened.
And as chaff and débris is thus pruned from the forest, so those trees themselves that are not physically fit for the struggle for existence are weeded out. The eye may not be able to pick these, but the gale finds them. If the whelming pressure of its steady onrush is not sufficient to bring them down, the racking of varying force and the torsion of sudden changes in direction will snap the weakened trunk or tear out the loosened roots. Then there is a groan and a crash, and space for the younger growth to spread toward more light and air.