WINTER'S COMING

An even-toned catalog of the preparations for winter observed by a small boy and girl around their farm. Cows are growing thick coats, the corn husks are thicker too, ducks and swans fly South, and the daddy-longlegs are coming indoors. The people, too, are getting ready—Dad chopping wood, Grandpa making sleds, Grandma knitting mittens, and Mother putting up preserves—and everyone is citing omens of a long hard winter. "Good," says the little boy. "I hope winter comes soon." Not resonant enough to be memorable, this does strike a quiet, expectant note, and though Knotts' scratchy, cross-hatched, winter-gray drawings lack the poetry of his illustrations for Barnstone's A Day in the Country (1971), they do their share to maintain the tone.