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CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS


The season was opened, formally, on the 10th of March. I am speaking for myself. Friday, the 8th, brought genuine spring weather, sunny and warm, an ideal day for the first bluebird; but I was obliged to waste it in the city. The 9th was rainy and cold, and though I spent some hours out of doors, I saw no vernal signs. Birds of all sorts were never so few. The next morning—cloudy, with a raw northeasterly wind—I was fifteen minutes away from home when a squirrel came out of the woods on one side of the way and ran across the road before me. It was a chipmunk, my first one of the new year, wide-awake and quick on its legs; and it was hardly in the hazel bushes on the other side of the road before another joined it, and the two chased each other out of sight. Spring had come.