Piermont, N. H.
DEAR JACK-IN-THE-PULPIT: You ask in the March number of the St.
Nicholas if any of us have seen crystallized horses "with our
own eyes." We (Willie and I) have seen them many times; so has
everybody else who lives here; that is, we have seen something
very much like it, though we do not call it the same. When the
thermometer is from thirty to thirty-six degrees below zero,
horses and oxen are all covered with a white frost, so you cannot
tell a black horse or ox from a white one; nor can you tell young
men from old ones. Their whiskers, eyebrows and eyelashes, are all
perfectly white. I've often had my ears frost-bitten in going to
the school-house, which is only about as far as two blocks in a
city.
When we see these sights, Jack Frost cannot paint his delicate
pictures on the windows, for a thick white frost covers them all
over, or rubs them out.
We like the St. Nicholas very much, and even our little sister,
Mary, likes to look at the pictures, and she said that she wished
she could see Jack-in-the-Pulpit. We intend to introduce her next
summer to some of your relations that live by the big brook.
We live about one hundred miles north-west of Concord, in the
Connecticut valley, about half a mile from the Connecticut River.
I am thirteen years old.--Good-bye,