“There are about seven hundred barrels of flour in town; it is admitted that fresh meat is getting scarce; the streets are almost impassable from the snow-drifts.

“K. and I have hit upon a plan for killing time.  We are learning poetry—­she takes twenty lines of Goldsmith’s ‘Traveller,’ and I twenty lines of the ‘Deserted Village.’  It will take us twenty days to learn the whole, and we hope to be stopped in our course by the opening of the harbor.  Considering that K. has a fiance from whom she cannot hear a word, she carries herself very amicably towards mankind.  She is making herself a pair of shoes, which look very well; I have made myself a morning-dress since we were closed in.

“Last night I took my first lesson in whist-playing.  I learned in one evening to know the king, queen, and jack apart, and to understand what my partner meant when she winked at me.

“The worst of this condition of things is that we shall bear the marks of it all our lives.  We are now sixteen daily papers behind the rest of the world, and in those sixteen papers are items known to all the people in all the cities, which will never be known to us.  How prices have fluctuated in that time we shall not know—­what houses have burned down, what robberies have been committed.  When the papers do come, each of us will rush for the latest dates; the news of two weeks ago is now history, and no one reads history, especially the history of one’s own country.

“I bought a copy of ‘Aurora Leigh’ just before the freezing up, and I have been careful, as it is the only copy on the island, to circulate it freely.  It must have been a pleasant visitor in the four or five households which it has entered.  We have had Dr. Kane’s book and now have the ‘Japan Expedition.’

“The intellectual suffering will, I think, be all.  I have no fear of scarcity of provisions or fuel.  There are old houses enough to burn.  Fresh meat is rather scarce because the English steamer required so much victualling.  We have a barrel of pork and a barrel of flour in the house, and father has chickens enough to keep us a good while.

“There are said to be some families who are in a good deal of suffering, for whom the Howard Society is on the lookout.  Mother gives very freely to Bridget, who has four children to support with only the labor of her hands.

“The Coffin School has been suspended one day on account of the heaviest storm, and the Unitarian church has had but one service.  No great damage has been done by the gales.  My observing-seat came thundering down the roof one evening, about ten o’clock, but all the world understood its cry of ‘Stand from under,’ and no one was hurt.  Several windows were blown in at midnight, and houses shook so that vases fell from the mantelpieces.

“The last snow drifted so that the sleighing was difficult, and at present the storm is so smothering that few are out.  A. has been out to school every day, and I have not failed to go out into the air once a day to take a short walk.