SNOW-BOUND.
The law of association is a queer piece of legislation. There is the
bit of road that used to extend from Toledo, where it connected with
the steamer, stage and canal packet, to Adrian, Michigan, where stages
took up the broken thread and jolted you on towards sunset. That road
always suggests love-apples to the writer! Love-apples in those days,
tomatoes in these. It was his first ride upon a railroad; and, reaching
Adrian, he for the first time saw and tasted the beautiful fruit that,
according to the newspapers, contains calomel and cancers. Was it a
Persian pig, or some other, that offered a crown jewel for a new dish?
Well, here was a new sensation, as strange as if the fruit that caused
it had grown in Ceylon of "the spicy breezes." The hands that served
them up are dust; the bit of road is lost in the great Lake Shore Line;
the hamlet Adrian, with its log-cabin outposts, has grown a city with
the flare and fashion of the latter day; but in the perishable tomato
the memory of that first ride, that broad, burning August day, those
pleasant friends, is assured forever.
There is the Road to Labrador, known as the Rome, Watertown &
Ogdensburg, that deludes you in winter time from modern Rome, in the
State of New York, and takes you into a world snowed clean of every
fence and vestige of civilization, except houses in white turbans set
waist-deep in the drifts. By-and-by the engine, with strange woodchuck
proclivities, falls to burrowing in a white bank, and there you wait
like a precious metal to be digged out. The wind gives Alaska howls
around the shivering car. The stoves comfort themselves with a quiet
smoke. The passengers scratch eyelet-holes in the frosted panes, and
see hospitable farmhouses within shouting range, but as inaccessible as
if they had been telescopic objects recently discovered in the moon.
The lazy wood is frying with the comforting sound of a speedy meal. The
brakemen stalk to and fro, and slam the doors, and are as talkative as
sphinxes. The women bend around the departed fire like willows around a
grave.
You wish you had Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explorations." A perusal of his
coldest chapter might warm you a little. You get out into the snow, and
flounder along to the engine. There it is, with its nose in the drift
like a setter, and sings as feebly as a tea-kettle. The water drips
through the joints of its harness, and hangs in icicles. Did you ever
see an icicle grow? Now is your time. A drop of water runs down to the
tip of the needle, halts and freezes. Then another, and another. Some
get a little way, and give out. So the icicle grows bigger. Others
manage to reach the point. So the icicle grows longer. It is about the
only vegetable that grows downward, except Spanish moss. The engineer
takes his dinner out of a little tin pail, and eats it before your
eyes. The fireman keeps up the fire, and warms his feet before your
toes. You ask the driver what is going to be done. He suspends the
polishing of a chicken bone for a second, and says, "Waitin' for time!"
Meanwhile the wind has been busy. It has chucked your hat into the
bank, and filled it with snow, Scripture measure.
You go to the rear of the train and look back. You cannot see whence
you came, nor how you ever _did_ come, nor where you will ever get
away. A brakeman starts out with a flag, and plods along the track. He
needn't. There is nothing in the world that can come, and no more
danger of colliding with a train than there is with the Fourth of July.
He has started for the last station, but he is in sight as long as you
can see him, and you could see him longer only it is getting dark.
By-and-by he returns, riding on an engine that catches us by the heels
and drags us back to the station, where the hours put a great deal of
lead in their shoes, and stalk slowly through the night. Two or three
boys come in. They are all of a bigness, like young Esquimaux. They
_are_ Esquimaux. They stand between you and the stove, and stare
at you. Like the moon, only one side of them is ever visible, and that
is the _fore_ side. They are glad there is a storm, glad the train
is stopped. It's fun. One of them has a basket of apples. You buy some.
You might as well try to eat a stalactite. They were frozen coming to
the depot, or before they started, or as soon as they ripened, and you
never knew when. Those boys laugh at your discomfiture, and you hope
there are white bears in Labrador, and that one of them is in a drift
outside with a good appetite, and that he will catch that apple-vender
and empty the basket and eat the boy! By-and-by the first engine gives
a frosty whistle and the second engine gives another, and the conductor
lets his head in at the door and shouts "All aboard!" as if he had been
hindered all this while waiting for you to buy apples and wish for
bears; and the passengers clamber into the car and huddle up, and away
they go.
There is a lecturer on board, an itinerant vender of literary wares. He
is as quiet as a statue, the coolest man in the party, and they are all
half-frozen. At Pulaski, or Mexico, or some other foreign or ancient
town upon that road, an audience awaits him. The Glee Club has sung
itself out. The village boys have burned off their boot-toes on the
red-hot stove. The blessed committee--if the town is large they number
two, but if small, then five--have gone to the depot to catch the
lecturer. He don't come, so they try to strike him with lightning, but
the wire is down and they miss him. The committee return to the hall
and dismiss the hungry ears. The ears level objurgations at the
lecturer--that word "objurgation" always reminds me of a club with a
_knot_ in it--and lift their skirts, and tie down their pantaloons,
and trail themselves home. The train rolls in on muffled wheels at
midnight, and the lecturer in it. But he does not land--not he--but
keeps on to Oswego, where are more ears. During the day he hears from
the committee. They want him to pay for lighting that hall, and making
that fire, and printing those bills, and spoiling their course, and he
pays it, and never more sees the halls of the Montezumas, if it be
Mexico, or shrieks with Campbell's Freedom, "when Kosciusko fell," if
it be Pulaski.
When thus snow-wrecked, there are several ways of getting warm without
fire, though fire is best. And just here comes in that queer law of
association. If reading about Dr. Kane's watch, that he handled with
fur gloves because it was so cold it _burned_ him, will not do,
try Mungo Park toasting to death under an African tree, or fancy
yourself wiping your brow with a dicky in the presence of an admiring
audience, or sitting down upon your new hat in a lady's parlor--if none
of these things will start the circulation, then nothing will do but
fire. That experience of yours in Labrador occurred in early April,
when bluebirds ought to be coming, and the sugar-bush bright with the
camp-fire, and you think of a ride you took in another April long ago,
upon the Memphis & Charleston Railway. You left Stevenson, a hamlet
among the Cumberlands. The train was indigo-blue with soldiers. The
country was wild with alarms. War may kill the husbandman, but it never
halts the Spring. Life is bound to break in green surges along the
woods and brighten the mountains. The air was warm as Northern June.
The sky was soft as a maiden's eye--I don't mean Minerva--the sun
unshorn of a tress of strength. You passed Huntsville, Alabama. You
were in a country lovely as a pleasant dream. The flowers all abroad in
the garden, a touch of gold upon the growing grain, the doors and
windows all set wide open. The swift train, like a shuttle in a loom,
wove the threads of green and blue, and the strands of sunshine, and
the fancy-work of flowers, into one exquisite piece of tapestry, and
laid it along the summer land. Out of the chill of the mountains, you
washed your hands in the blessed air, all tinted and perfumed, and were
glad. You left Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, behind
you. You are bound for La Crosse. Twenty-four hours ago it was June.
Now it is March. The ground is frosted like a bridal loaf. The pastures
are brown. The woods lift their giant arms in silent waiting.
The engine has run over parallels of latitude as if they were shadows,
but it has done more. It has borne you from summer to winter in a round
day. The stain of ripe strawberries is on your fingers, but your
fingers are in mittens! We are all fashioned to live a great while in a
_little_ while, if we only know how. June and January are nearer
together than any other brace of months in all the year. Show us the
boy who, when he counts his temporal treasures and thinks of the Fourth
of July, does not make a mental dive for his Christmas stocking the
next minute!