in the morning there is a grand dress-rehearsal of the birds.  Not all the pieces of the orchestra have arrived; but there are enough.  The grass-sparrow has come.  This is certainly charming.  The gardener comes to talk about seeds:  he uncovers the straw-berries and the grape-vines, salts the asparagus-bed, and plants the peas.  You ask if he planted them with a shot-gun.  In the shade there is still frost in the ground.  Nature, in fact, still hesitates; puts forth one hepatica at a time, and waits to see the result; pushes up the grass slowly, perhaps draws it in at night.

This indecision we call Spring.

It becomes painful.  It is like being on the rack for ninety days, expecting every day a reprieve.  Men grow hardened to it, however.

This is the order with man,—­hope, surprise, bewilderment, disgust, facetiousness.  The people in New England finally become facetious about spring.  This is the last stage:  it is the most dangerous.  When a man has come to make a jest of misfortune, he is lost.  “It bores me to die,” said the journalist Carra to the headsman at the foot of the guillotine:  “I would like to have seen the continuation.”  One is also interested to see how spring is going to turn out.

A day of sun, of delusive bird-singing, sight of the mellow earth, —­all these begin to beget confidence.  The night, even, has been warm.  But what is this in the morning journal, at breakfast?—­“An area of low pressure is moving from the Tortugas north.”  You shudder.

What is this Low Pressure itself,—­it?  It is something frightful, low, crouching, creeping, advancing; it is a foreboding; it is misfortune by telegraph; it is the “’93” of the atmosphere.

This low pressure is a creation of Old Prob.  What is that?  Old Prob. is the new deity of the Americans, greater than AEolus, more despotic than Sans-Culotte.  The wind is his servitor, the lightning his messenger.  He is a mystery made of six parts electricity, and one part “guess.”  This deity is worshiped by the Americans; his name is on every man’s lips first in the morning; he is the Frankenstein of modern science.  Housed at Washington, his business is to direct the storms of the whole country upon New England, and to give notice in advance.  This he does.  Sometimes he sends the storm, and then gives notice.  This is mere playfulness on his part:  it is all one to him.  His great power is in the low pressure.

On the Bexar plains of Texas, among the hills of the Presidio, along the Rio Grande, low pressure is bred; it is nursed also in the Atchafalaya swamps of Louisiana; it moves by the way of Thibodeaux and Bonnet Carre.  The southwest is a magazine of atmospheric disasters.  Low pressure may be no worse than the others:  it is better known, and is most used to inspire terror.  It can be summoned any time also from the everglades of Florida, from the morasses of the Okeechobee.