the cabin under the hemlock would be boarded up.  Bill the Guide would go off to the lumber camps beyond the Ottanoonsis, and Silverwater would be left to the snow and the solitude of winter.  His heart tightened with homesickness.  Yet, after all, he reflected, during the months of cold his beloved Silverwater would be none too friendly a place, especially to such of the little furred and feathered folk as were bold enough to linger about its shores.  He shivered as he thought of the difference winter must make to all the children of the wild.

“Why so solemn all of a sudden?” asked Uncle Andy, eyeing him suspiciously.  “I thought a minute ago you’d take the whole roof off the forest an’ scare the old bull moose across the lake into shedding his new antlers.”

“I was just thinking,” answered the Child.

“And does it hurt?” inquired Uncle Andy politely.

But, young as he was, the Child had learned to ignore sarcasm—­especially Uncle Andy’s, which he seldom understood.

“I was just wondering,” he replied, shaking his head thoughtfully, “what the young ones of all the wild creatures would do in the winter to keep warm.  Bill says they all go to sleep.  But I don’t see how that keeps them warm, Uncle Andy.”

“Oh, Bill!” remarked Uncle Andy, in a tone which stripped all Bill’s statements of the last shreds of authority.  “But, as a matter of fact, there aren’t many youngsters around in the woods in winter—­not enough for you to be looking so solemn about.  They’re mostly born early enough in spring and summer to be pretty well grown up by the time winter comes on them.”

“Gee!” murmured the Child enviously.  “I wish I could get grown up as quick as that.”

Uncle Andy sniffed.

“There are lots of people besides you,” said he, “that don’t know when they’re well off.  But,” he continued, seating himself on Bill’s chopping log and meditatively cleaning out his pipe bowl with a bit of chip, “there are some youngsters who have a fashion of getting themselves born right in the worst of the cold weather—­and that not here in Silverwater neither, but way up north, where weather is weather, let me tell you—­where it gets so cold that, if you were foolish enough to cry, the tears would all freeze instantly, till your eyes were shut up in a regular ice jam.”

“I wouldn’t cry,” declared the Child.

“No?  But I don’t want you to interrupt me any more.”

“Of course not,” said the Child politely.  Uncle Andy eyed him searchingly, and then decided to go on.

“Away up north,” he began abruptly—­and paused to light his pipe—­“away up north, as I was saying, it was just midwinter.  It was also midnight—­which, in those latitudes, is another way of saying the same thing.  The land as far as eye could see in every direction was flat, dead white, and smooth as a table, except for the long curving windrows into which the hard snow