Through Four Seasons

Dear Girls and Boys:


You are the same children all through the year, but you do not look just the same in winter and in summer. Your January clothes are different from those you wear in July. Perhaps the color of your skin is changed, too. It will be a few shades darker during the season of brightest sunshine if you are outdoors as much as you should be. You may have more freckles in summer, and perhaps your hair will be bleached by the sun to a little different shade.


People do not do exactly the same things in spring as they do in the fall. Farmers plant seeds in the ground in the spring. In the fall they harvest food for winter use. Storekeepers show different things in their shop windows in summer and winter.


Fashions change in games as well as in work. You like to play some games in summer that would not be nearly so pleasant in winter.


People may be happy at any time in the year, and yet there is some difference in the kinds of happiness. The joy you have in looking at the first pussy willow or bluet or violet or other spring flower is not quite the same as that you feel in the jolly fall, when the chattering squirrel gathers his acorns and the trees let their gay leaves go fluttering down.


If people do not look and act and feel just the same at different times of the year, what about the rest of the world?


Well, a bobolink is the same bird in the fall as he is in the spring, although he does not look and act the same. In the spring he wears a suit of white and black and yellow, but in the fall his feathers show mostly olive and brown colors. He does not act the same, either. In the spring he sings a joyous bubbling song of many lovely, lively notes. In the fall he repeats, over and over again, one call that sounds as if he were answering the rest of the bobolinks, who are all making the same sociable sound.


You will understand that there is not room in one book to tell about more than a few of the wonderful things in the world, for a book is small and the world itself is very large. There are indeed more interesting things in the world than have ever been described in all the books that have been printed.


So suppose that you read the chapters in this book and think about them in a special way. Think about them as samples of what the world has to show. Then perhaps you will wish to look at the things of the world for yourselves.


We wish you happy hours—all through the year.


Your friends,


Edith M. Patch

Harrison E. Howe