They Do Not Appear In The City Papers, They Are Not Much Heard In
The Streets, And They Tell Very Little In The Outsider's Estimate Of
America.
And they are the American.
LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK
(1895)
We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning, and that was
when the first blood-root came up between the patches of April snow,
while yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held fast. In the
shadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles, clots of snow lay
till far into May, but neither the season nor the flowers took any note
of them, and, before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys of
my Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to tell us that Summer was
in the valley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the garden?
Followed, Summer, angry, fidgety, and nervous, with the corn and tobacco
to ripen in five short months, the pastures to reclothe, and the fallen
leaves to hide away under new carpets. Suddenly, in the middle of her
work, on a stuffy-still July day, she called a wind out of the
Northwest, a wind blown under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wicked
bitter wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came and was gone
in less than ten minutes, but blocked the roads with fallen trees,
toppled over a barn, and - blew potatoes out of the ground!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 97 of 264
Words from 26267 to 26520
of 71314
