balmy, cloudless spring day and Sunday was mild, but rainy, and the 

 official forecast for Monday was "colder, northwesterly winds." Never 

 were poor mortals more bewildered than we, when we got up on Mon- 

 day morning, to find ourselves back in midwinter, a furious gale driving 

 the snow in horizontal lines. We were in the predicament of the inhabi- 

 tant of Laramie, Wyo., who, when asked whether there was very heavy 

 snowfall there, repUed: "Well, no; not much falls, but a terrible lot 

 passes through." 



Already, the drifts were so deep, that the milk-wagons could scarcely 

 make their rounds and only with extraneous help. So tremendous was 

 the force of the wind, that it took three men to get a fork-full of hay 

 across the stable yard, for the horses had to be fed. For three days the 

 blizzard continued, with very gradually diminishing violence, and the 

 enormous drifts were such as have never been seen here since, and some 

 of them, I was told, did not disappear till June. Though the main line 

 was blocked, the direction of the wind kept the branch open and several 

 train loads of passengers, who were stalled near the Junction, were 

 brought up to Princeton and quartered, where room could be found for 

 them. For four days we were cut off from the outside world, getting no 

 mails, or newspapers. We found the snow much deeper in New York 

 than in Princeton. Indeed, New York seemed to be the point of greatest 

 snowfall in a singularly localised storm, which extended over the coastal 

 strip from Connecticut to Baltimore and westward to Harrisburg. 



Notwithstanding the blizzard, the spring of that year was unusually 

 early and, when we sailed on April 14, vegetation was farther advanced 

 than we found it in England ten days later. The day before saiUng I 

 called at the office of R. W. Forbes and Son, to bid farewell to my friend, 

 Billy Forbes. In his room were a lot of tables, covered with brick-like 

 blocks of crystalline substance, ranging in colour from dark brown to 

 nearly white. My curiosity aroused, I said: "Billy, what is this stuff?" 

 He replied : "It's glucose, they're making it out of corn now." "What do 

 you do with it?" "Oh! I send it all over the world; among other things, 

 I ship fifty tons of it a week to the English brewers." I have often found 

 that information, picked up in this random way came in very handily 

 at some later time but, in this instance, the use followed speedily and in 

 a rather absurd way, in London. 



C 204 ] 



