We have seen a drama of the people played quite recently, having been to New York to spend part of a “midwinter” week’s vacation, which father insisted that Evan should take between two rather complex and eye-straining pieces of work.  Speaking by the almanac, it wasn’t midwinter at all, but pre-spring, which, in spite of lengthening days, is the only uncompromisingly disagreeable season in the country—­the time when measles usually invades the village school, the dogs come slinking in guiltily to the fire, pasted with frozen mud, the boys have snuffle colds, in spite of father’s precautions, and I grow desperate and flout the jonquils in my window garden, it seems so very long since summer, and longer yet to real budding spring.  We arrived at home last night in the wildest snowstorm of the season, and this morning Evan, having smoothed out his mental wrinkles by means of our mild city diversions, is now filling his lungs and straightening his shoulders by building a wonderful snow fort for the boys.  Presently I shall go down to help them bombard him in it, and try to persuade them that it will last longer if they do not squeeze the snowballs too hard, for Evan has prohibited “baking” altogether.

The “baking” of snowballs consists of making up quite a batch at once, then dipping them in water and leaving them out until they are hard as rocks, and really wicked missiles.

The process, unknown in polite circles here, though practised by the factory town “muskrats,” was taught my babies by the Vanderveer boy during the Christmas holidays, which, being snowy and bright, drew the colony to the Bluffs for coasting, skating, etc., giving father such a river of senseless accidents to wade through that he threatens to absent himself and take refuge with Martin Cortright in his Irving Place den for holiday week next year.  Father has ridden many a night when the roads would not admit of wheeling, without thought of complaint, to the charcoal camp to tend a new mother, a baby, or a woodchopper suddenly stricken with pneumonia, that is so common a disease among men living as these do on poor food, in tiny close cabins, and continually getting checks of perspiration in the variable climate.  During the holidays he was called to the Bluffs in the middle of two consecutive nights, first to the Vanderveers, and requested to “drug” the second assistant butler, who was wildly drunk, and being a recent acquisition had been brought to officiate at the house party without due trial, “so that he wouldn’t be used up the next day,” and then to the Ponsonby’s, where the family had evidently not yet gone to bed.  Here he found that the patient, a visiting school friend of one of the daughters, from up the state, and evidently not used to the whirl of the pool, had skated all day, and, kept going by unaccustomed stimulants, taken half from ignorance, half from bravado, had danced the evening through at the club house, and then collapsed.