Mandeville.  When I was a boy, I always associated Calvinism and calomel together.  I thought that homeopathy—­similia, etc.—­had done away with both of them.

Our next door (rising).  If you are going into theology, I’m off..

IV

I fear we are not getting on much with the joyousness of winter.  In order to be exhilarating it must be real winter.  I have noticed that the lower the thermometer sinks the more fiercely the north wind rages, and the deeper the snow is, the higher rise the spirits of the community.  The activity of the “elements” has a great effect upon country folk especially; and it is a more wholesome excitement than that caused by a great conflagration.  The abatement of a snow-storm that grows to exceptional magnitude is regretted, for there is always the half-hope that this will be, since it has gone so far, the largest fall of snow ever known in the region, burying out of sight the great fall of 1808, the account of which is circumstantially and aggravatingly thrown in our way annually upon the least provocation.  We all know how it reads:  “Some said it began at daylight, others that it set in after sunrise; but all agree that by eight o’clock Friday morning it was snowing in heavy masses that darkened the air.”

The morning after we settled the five—­or is it seven?—­points of Calvinism, there began a very hopeful snow-storm, one of those wide-sweeping, careering storms that may not much affect the city, but which strongly impress the country imagination with a sense of the personal qualities of the weather,—­power, persistency, fierceness, and roaring exultation.  Out-doors was terrible to those who looked out of windows, and heard the raging wind, and saw the commotion in all the high tree-tops and the writhing of the low evergreens, and could not summon resolution to go forth and breast and conquer the bluster.  The sky was dark with snow, which was not permitted to fall peacefully like a blessed mantle, as it sometimes does, but was blown and rent and tossed like the split canvas of a ship in a gale.  The world was taken possession of by the demons of the air, who had their will of it.  There is a sort of fascination in such a scene, equal to that of a tempest at sea, and without its attendant haunting sense of peril; there is no fear that the house will founder or dash against your neighbor’s cottage, which is dimly seen anchored across the field; at every thundering onset there is no fear that the cook’s galley will upset, or the screw break loose and smash through the side, and we are not in momently expectation of the tinkling of the little bell to “stop her.”  The snow rises in drifting waves, and the naked trees bend like strained masts; but so long as the window-blinds remain fast, and the chimney-tops do not go, we preserve an equal mind.  Nothing more serious can happen than the failure of the butcher’s and the grocer’s