In this connection it may be written that a subscription clerk in the office of the Chicago Daily Standard, having noted a single subscriber from Canaan, was, a fortnight later, pleased to receive, by one mail, nine subscriptions from that promising town.  If one brought nine others in a fortnight, thought he, what would nine bring in a month?  Amazingly, they brought nothing, and the rest was silence.  Here was a matter of intricate diplomacy never to come within that youth his ken.  The morning voyage to the post-office, long mocked as a fable and screen by the families of the sages, had grown so difficult to accomplish for one of them, Colonel Flitcroft (Colonel in the war with Mexico), that he had been put to it, indeed, to foot the firing-line against his wife (a lady of celebrated determination and hale-voiced at seventy), and to defend the rental of a box which had sheltered but three missives in four years.  Desperation is often inspiration; the Colonel brilliantly subscribed for the Standard, forgetting to give his house address, and it took the others just thirteen days to wring his secret from him.  Then the Standard served for all.

Mail-time had come to mean that bright hour when they all got their feet on the brass rod which protected the sills of the two big windows, with the steam-radiators sizzling like kettles against the side wall.  Mr. Jonas Tabor, who had sold his hardware business magnificently (not magnificently for his nephew, the purchaser) some ten years before, was usually, in spite of the fact that he remained a bachelor at seventy-nine, the last to settle down with the others, though often the first to reach the hotel, which he always entered by a side door, because he did not believe in the treating system.  And it was Mr. Eskew Arp, only seventy-five, but already a thoroughly capable cynic, who, almost invariably “opened the argument,” and it was he who discovered the sinister intention behind the weather of this particular morning.  Mr. Arp had not begun life so sourly:  as a youth he had been proud of his given name, which had come to him through his mother’s family, who had made it honorable, but many years of explanations that Eskew did not indicate his initials had lowered his opinion of the intelligence and morality of the race.

The malevolence of his voice and manner this morning, therefore, when he shook his finger at the town beyond the windows, and exclaimed, with a bitter laugh, “Look at it!” was no surprise to his companions.  “Jest look at it!  I tell you the devil is mighty smart.  Ha, ha!  Mighty smart!”

Through custom it was the duty of Squire Buckalew (Justice of the Peace in ’59) to be the first to take up Mr. Arp.  The others looked to him for it.  Therefore, he asked, sharply: 

“What’s the devil got to do with snow?”

“Everything to do with it, sir,” Mr. Arp retorted.  “It’s plain as day to anybody with eyes and sense.”