At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect:  its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him.  The house-fly thaws out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window.  It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised.  A flock of millers, born out of time, flutter in.  It is most unusual weather for the season:  it is so every year.  The delusion is complete, when, on a mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the edge of the pond.  The citizen asks his neighbor, “Did you hear the frogs last night?” That seems to open the new world.  One thinks of his childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves.  It fills one with sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad.  Man is a strange being.  Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad.  The signs of the spring multiply.  The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant leaning on the area-gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, “How sweet it is to be with those we love to be with!”

All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early buds of sentiment.  The telegraph announces, “Twenty feet of snow at Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron.”

Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?  Before noon it rains, by three o’clock it hails; before night the bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging, whirling about a tempest of snow.  By morning the snow is drifted in banks, and two feet deep on a level.  Early in the seventeenth century, Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass.  Before that, men had suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering.  A century later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds a new because distinct terror to the weather.  Science names and registers the ills of life; and yet it is a gain to know the names and habits of our enemies.  It is with some satisfaction in our knowledge that we say the thermometer marks zero.

In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England.  Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation.  But we are wise.  We say it is better to have it now than later.  We have a conceit of understanding things.

The sun is in alliance with the earth.  Between the two the snow is uncomfortable.  Compelled to go, it decides to go suddenly.  The first day there is slush with rain; the second day, mud with hail; the third day a flood with sunshine.  The thermometer declares that the temperature is delightful.  Man shivers and sneezes.  His neighbor dies of some disease newly named by science; but he dies all the same as if it hadn’t been newly named.  Science has not discovered any name that is not fatal.