This is what happened after the convention of the blackbirds:  A moaning south wind brought rain; a southwest wind turned the rain to snow; what is called a zephyr, out of the west, drifted the snow; a north wind sent the mercury far below freezing.  Salt added to snow increases the evaporation and the cold.  This was the office of the northeast wind:  it made the snow damp, and increased its bulk; but then it rained a little, and froze, thawing at the same time.  The air was full of fog and snow and rain.  And then the wind changed, went back round the circle, reversing everything, like dragging a cat by its tail.  The mercury approached zero.  This was nothing uncommon.  We know all these winds.  We are familiar with the different “forms of water.”

All this was only the prologue, the overture.  If one might be permitted to speak scientifically, it was only the tuning of the instruments.  The opera was to come,—­the Flying Dutchman of the air.

There is a wind called Euroclydon:  it would be one of the Eumenides; only they are women.  It is half-brother to the gigantic storm-wind of the equinox.  The Euroclydon is not a wind:  it is a monster.  Its breath is frost.  It has snow in its hair.  It is something terrible.  It peddles rheumatism, and plants consumption.

The Euroclydon knew just the moment to strike into the discord of the weather in New England.  From its lair about Point Desolation, from the glaciers of the Greenland continent, sweeping round the coast, leaving wrecks in its track, it marched right athwart the other conflicting winds, churning them into a fury, and inaugurating chaos.  It was the Marat of the elements.  It was the revolution marching into the “dreaded wood of La Sandraie.”

Let us sum it all up in one word:  it was something for which there is no name.

Its track was destruction.  On the sea it leaves wrecks.  What does it leave on land?  Funerals.  When it subsides, New England is prostrate.  It has left its legacy:  this legacy is coughs and patent medicines.  This is an epic; this is destiny.  You think Providence is expelled out of New England?  Listen!

Two days after Euroclydon, I found in the woods the hepatica —­earliest of wildwood flowers, evidently not intimidated by the wild work of the armies trampling over New England—­daring to hold up its tender blossom.  One could not but admire the quiet pertinacity of Nature.  She had been painting the grass under the snow.  In spots it was vivid green.  There was a mild rain,—­mild, but chilly.  The clouds gathered, and broke away in light, fleecy masses.  There was a softness on the hills.  The birds suddenly were on every tree, glancing through the air, filling it with song, sometimes shaking raindrops from their wings.  The cat brings in one in his mouth.  He thinks the season has begun, and the game-laws are off.  He is fond of Nature, this cat, as we all are:  he wants to possess it.  At four o’clock