I’ll tell you how the snow-birds come,
Here in our Winter days;
They make me think of chickens,
With their cunning little ways.
birds in snow
We go to bed at night, and leave
The ground all bare and brown,
And not a single snow-bird
decoration149decorationTo be seen in all the town.
But when we wake at morning
The ground with snow is white,
And with the snow, the snow-birds
Must have travelled all the night;
For the streets and yards are full of them,
The dainty little things,
With snow-white breasts, and soft brown heads,
And speckled russet wings.
Not here and there a snow-bird,
As we see them at the East,
But in great flocks, like grasshoppers,
By hundreds, at the least,
They push and crowd and jostle,
And twitter as they feed,
And hardly lift their heads up,
For fear to miss a seed.
What ’tis they eat, nobody seems
To know or understand;
The seeds are much too fine to see,
decoration150decorationAll sifted in the sand.
But winds last Summer scattered them,
All thickly on these plains;
The little snow-birds have no barns,
But God protects their grains.
. . . . . . .
Some flocks count up to thousands,
I know, and when they fly,
Their tiny wings make rustle,
As if a wind went by.
They go as quickly as they ............