That Any One Should Dare To Call This Climate Muggy, Yea, Even
'subtropical,' Was A Shock.
There came such a man, and he said, 'Go
north if you want weather - weather that is weather.
Go to New
England.' So New York passed away upon a sunny afternoon, with her roar
and rattle, her complex smells, her triply over-heated rooms, and much
too energetic inhabitants, while the train went north to the lands where
the snow lay. It came in one sweep - almost, it seemed, in one turn of
the wheels - covering the winter-killed grass and turning the frozen
ponds that looked so white under the shadow of lean trees into pools of
ink.
As the light closed in, a little wooden town, white, cloaked, and dumb,
slid past the windows, and the strong light of the car lamps fell upon a
sleigh (the driver furred and muffled to his nose) turning the corner of
a street. Now the sleigh of a picture-book, however well one knows it,
is altogether different from the thing in real life, a means of
conveyance at a journey's end; but it is well not to be over-curious in
the matter, for the same American who has been telling you at length how
he once followed a kilted Scots soldier from Chelsea to the Tower, out
of pure wonder and curiosity at his bare knees and sporran, will laugh
at your interest in 'just a cutter.'
The staff of the train - surely the great American nation would be lost
if deprived of the ennobling society of brakeman, conductor, Pullman-car
conductor, negro porter, and newsboy - told pleasant tales, as they
spread themselves at ease in the smoking compartments, of snowings up
the line to Montreal, of desperate attacks - four engines together and a
snow-plough in front - on drifts thirty feet high, and the pleasures of
walking along the tops of goods wagons to brake a train, with the
thermometer thirty below freezing.
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