It Would Be Very
Interesting To Get The Statistics Of Revivals And Murders, And Find How
Many Of Them Have Been Committed In The Spring.
But for undistracted
people winter is one long delight of the eye.
In other lands one knows
the snow as a nuisance that comes and goes, and is sorely man-handled
and messed at the last. Here it lies longer on the ground than any
crop - from November to April sometimes - and for three months life goes
to the tune of sleigh-bells, which are not, as a Southern visitor once
hinted, ostentation, but safeguards. The man who drives without them is
not loved. The snow is a faithful barometer, foretelling good sleighing
or stark confinement to barracks. It is all the manure the stony
pastures receive; it cloaks the ground and prevents the frost bursting
pipes; it is the best - I had almost written the only - road-maker in the
States. On the other side it can rise up in the night and bid the people
sit still as the Egyptians. It can stop mails; wipe out all time-tables;
extinguish the lamps of twenty towns, and kill man within sight of his
own door-step or hearing of his cattle unfed. No one who has been
through even so modified a blizzard as New England can produce talks
lightly of the snow. Imagine eight-and-forty hours of roaring wind, the
thermometer well down towards zero, scooping and gouging across a
hundred miles of newly fallen snow.
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