Another day she attacks the piles of dead leaves, where they have lain since last October, and scatters them in a trice, so that every cranny may be sunned and aired. Or, grasping her long brooms by the handles, she will go into the woods and beat the icicles off the big trees as a housewife would brush down cobwebs.

This done, she begins to hang up soft, new curtains at the forest windows, and to spread over her floor a new carpet of an emerald loveliness such as no mortal looms could ever have woven.

And then, at last, she sends out invitations through the south for the birds to come and spend the summer in Kentucky. The invitations are sent out in March, and accepted in April and May, and by June her house is full of visitors.

Not the eyes alone love Nature in March. Every other sense hies abroad. My tongue hunts for the last morsel of snow on the northern root of some aged oak. As one goes early to a concerthall with a passion even for the preliminary tuning of the musicians, so my ear sits alone in the vast amphitheater of Nature and waits for the earliest warble of the bluebird, which seems to start up somewhere behind the heavenly curtains. And the scent of spring, is it not the first lyric of the nose—that despised poet of the senses?

From “A Kentucky Cardinal”,

Copyright, Harper and Brothers