Two Island youths were arraigned in Edgartown District Court on Monday and charged in connection with a mid-afternoon break-in last Friday at a Chilmark home. Jonathan Wild of Vineyard Haven, 17, and Owen White of West Tisbury, 19, both of them seniors at the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School, were apprehended by Chilmark police with the help of citizens, the state police and officers from Aquinnah and West Tisbury.

When the groundhog awakens from his long winter nap tomorrow at dawn, he will rise from his hole in the ground and think he overslept. If he lived on the Vineyard, he'd think it was already spring.

Forsythia are in bloom, and in the past week there have been sightings of honeybees and, in West Tisbury, a butterfly. Snow drops are in bloom in various places from Edgartown to West Tisbury.

The remains of the Tisbury Inn will be razed in the weeks ahead. An Island contractor, Dale McClure of Watercourse Construction, met with innkeepers Sherman and Susan Goldstein of West Tisbury for three hours on Wednesday to discuss the process.

It is every organizer's hope that as an event recurs from year to year, it gets better and bigger. Last Monday and Tuesday, Vineyard Haven once again became a festive center for the arrival of a new year on-Island - and while Last Night, First Day activities may not have drawn quite as many people as past celebrations, sponsors believe the new program represented a change for the better.

The owners of the Tisbury Inn plan to demolish the old building early in February, with an eye toward building a new hotel and health center. Susan Goldstein, who with her husband Sherman owns the inn, said yesterday they are talking with local contractors about taking down what remains of the complex, at the head of Main street in Tisbury, which was ruined in a fire that began in the evening of Saturday, Dec. 15.

The Tisbury Inn was destroyed Saturday night by a fire that started in mid-evening and wasn't fully extinguished until late afternoon Sunday. More than 100 firefighters and public safety personnel were called to the center of the town to fight the blaze at the landmark hotel.