It is almost clear
overhead: but the clouds thicken on the horizon; they look leaden;
they threaten rain. It certainly will rain: the air feels like rain,
or snow. By noon it begins to snow, and you hear the desolate cry of
the phoebe-bird. It is a fine snow, gentle at first; but it soon
drives in swerving lines, for the wind is from the southwest, from
the west, from the northeast, from the zenith (one of the ordinary
winds of New England), from all points of the compass. The fine snow
becomes rain; it becomes large snow; it melts as it falls; it freezes
as it falls. At last a storm sets in, and night shuts down upon the
bleak scene.
During the night there is a change. It thunders and lightens.
Toward morning there is a brilliant display of aurora borealis. This
is a sign of colder weather.
The gardener is in despair; so is the sportsman. The trout take no
pleasure in biting in such weather.
Paragraphs appear in the newspapers, copied from the paper of last
year, saying that this is the most severe spring in thirty years.
Every one, in fact, believes that it is, and also that next year the
spring will be early. Man is the most gullible of creatures.
And with reason: he trusts his eyes, and not his instinct. During
this most sour weather of the year, the anemone blossoms; and, almost
immediately after, the fairy pencil, the spring beauty, the dog-tooth
violet, and the true violet. In clouds and fog, and rain and snow,
and all discouragement, Nature pushes on her forces with progressive
haste and rapidity. Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows
are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a
burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink,
the hawthorns give a sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the
world, of color.
In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with
the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees. The next day the
mercury stands at eighty degrees. Summer has come.
There was no Spring.
The winter is over. You think so? Robespierre thought the
Revolution was over in the beginning of his last Thermidor. He lost
his head after that.
When the first buds are set, and the corn is up, and the cucumbers
have four leaves, a malicious frost steals down from the north and
kills them in a night.
That is the last effort of spring. The mercury then mounts to ninety
degrees. The season has been long, but, on the whole, successful.
Many people survive it.
End of How Spring Came in New England by Charles Dudley Warner
