March 15.--Why, it is only two days since that delightful ramble of
ours. Two days, but what a change! The snow has been falling all night
long. It was falling still when these lines were penned, falling thick
and fast. Not in those great lazy butterfly-like flakes, that look so
strange and beautiful when you gaze skywards, nor in the little
millet-seed snow-grains that precede the bigger flakes, but in a mingled
mist of snow-stars, that falls O! so fast and looks so cold.
The whole world is robed in its winding-sheet. The earth looks dead.
To-day is but the ghost of yesterday. The leafless elms, the lindens
and the oaks are trees of coral, the larches and pines mere shapes of
snow shadowed out with a faint green hue beneath.
And the birds! Well, the thrush still sings. What a world of hope the
bird must carry in his heart! But the blackbird flies now and then
through the snow-clad shrubbery with sudden bickering screams that
startle even the sparrows. The lark is silent again, and shivering
robin comes once more to the study-window to beg for crumbs and comfort.
And this snow continues to fall, and fall till it lies six good inches
deep on roof and road and hedgerow. And it is sad to think of the
buried snowdrops, of the crocuses, yellow and blue, and the
sweet-scented primroses.
March 17.--The pines are borne groundwards, at least their branches
droop with the weight of snow; they are very weird-like, very lovely.
The snow has melted on the roofs, but the dripping water has frozen into
a network of crystal on the rose-bushes that cling around the verandah.
It has mostly melted off the tall lindens also, only leaving pieces here
and there that look for all the world like a flock of strange big birds.
Everything is beautiful--but all is silent, all is sad.
The sun goes down in a purple haze, looking like a big blood orange; and
an hour afterwards, when the stars come out, there is all along the
horizon a long broad band of rose tint, shading upwards into yellow, and
so into the blue of the night.
I close my study-windows, and go into the next room; how bright the fire
looks, how cheerful the faces round it! Hurricane Bob is snoring on the
hearth, Ida is asleep beside him, Maggie May has got hold of a picture
and wants me to weave a story to it.