He came regularly at eleven and again
at three in the afternoon, and a barn owl went by with a screech every
evening a little after eight. The starlings told the time of the year as
accurately as the best chronometer at Whitehall. When I saw the last
chimney swallow, November 30, they went by to their sleeping-trees about
three o'clock in the afternoon--a long night, a short day for them. So
they continued till in January the day had grown thirty minutes longer,
when they went to roost so much the later; in February, four o'clock; in
March, by degrees their time for passing by the window _en route_ drew on
to five o'clock. Let the cold be never so great or the sky so clouded,
the mysterious influence of the light, as the sun slowly rises higher on
the meridian, sinks into the earth like a magic rain. It enters the
hardest bark and the rolled-up bud, so firm that its point will prick the
finger like a thorn; it stirs beneath the surface of the ground. A
magnetism that is not heat, and for which there is no exact name, works
out of sight in answer to the sun. Seen or unseen, clouded or not, every
day the sun lifts itself an inch higher, and let the north wind shrivel
as it may, this invisible potency compels the bud to swell and the flower
to be ready in its calyx. Progress goes on in spite of every
discouragement. The birch trees reddened all along their slender boughs,
and when the sunlight struck aslant, the shining bark shone like gossamer
threads wet with dew.
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