and broad lakes, which turn to rock beneath his footsteps.  His dreary empire is established; all around stretches the desolation of the pole.  Yet not ungrateful be his New England children (for Winter is our sire, though a stern and rough one)—­not ungrateful even for the severities which have nourished our unyielding strength of character.  And let us thank him, too, for the sleigh-rides cheered by the music of merry bells; for the crackling and rustling hearth when the ruddy firelight gleams on hardy manhood and the blooming cheek of woman:  for all the home-enjoyments and the kindred virtues which flourish in a frozen soil.  Not that we grieve when, after some seven months of storm and bitter frost, Spring, in the guise of a flower-crowned virgin, is seen driving away the hoary despot, pelting him with violets by the handful and strewing green grass on the path behind him.  Often ere he will give up his empire old Winter rushes fiercely buck and hurls a snowdrift at the shrinking form of Spring, yet step by step he is compelled to retreat northward, and spends the summer month within the Arctic circle.

Such fantasies, intermixed among graver toils of mind, have made the winter’s day pass pleasantly.  Meanwhile, the storm has raged without abatement, and now, as the brief afternoon declines, is tossing denser volumes to and fro about the atmosphere.  On the window-sill there is a layer of snow reaching halfway up the lowest pane of glass.  The garden is one unbroken bed.  Along the street are two or three spots of uncovered earth where the gust has whirled away the snow, heaping it elsewhere to the fence-tops or piling huge banks against the doors of houses.  A solitary passenger is seen, now striding mid-leg deep across a drift, now scudding over the bare ground, while his cloak is swollen with the wind.  And now the jingling of bells—­a sluggish sound responsive to the horse’s toilsome progress through the unbroken drifts—­announces the passage of a sleigh with a boy clinging behind and ducking his head to escape detection by the driver.  Next comes a sledge laden with wood for some unthrifty housekeeper whom winter has surprised at a cold hearth.  But what dismal equipage now struggles along the uneven street?  A sable hearse bestrewn with snow is bearing a dead man through the storm to his frozen bed.  Oh how dreary is a burial in winter, when the bosom of Mother Earth has no warmth for her poor child!

Evening—­the early eve of December—­begins to spread its deepening veil over the comfortless scene.  The firelight gradually brightens and throws my flickering shadow upon the walls and ceiling of the chamber, but still the storm rages and rattles against the windows.  Alas!  I shiver and think it time to be disconsolate, but, taking a farewell glance at dead Nature in her shroud, I perceive a flock of snowbirds skimming lightsomely through the tempest and flitting from drift to drift as sportively as swallows in the delightful prime of summer.  Whence come they?  Where do they build their nests and seek their food?  Why, having airy wings, do they not follow summer around the earth, instead of making themselves the playmates of the storm and fluttering on the dreary verge of the winter’s eve?  I know not whence they come, nor why; yet my spirit has been cheered by that wandering flock of snow-birds.