A TEMPEST. 



ON the afternoon of Saturday, January 24, 

 while roaming over the hills between Arlington 

 and Medford, I made up my mind not to spend 

 the next day in the woods. Nature seemed to 

 have become prosaic, almost dull. I saw one 

 crow, no other tenant of the woods. The snow 

 had been washed away and the ice which re- 

 mained was stained. The air was heavy with 

 the breath of long-forgotten cabbage-leaves. 

 Farmers were at work in their plowed lands, 

 stirring up other odors equally obnoxious. Even 

 the fields were unpleasant to walk over on ac- 

 count of their alternate patches of ice and pasty 

 mud. But Sunday morning before sunrise the 

 wind shifted to the northeast and changed a 

 drizzling rain into a furious snowstorm, and by 

 noon, when I reached the first hill -top above 

 Arlington, the storm was at its height. The air 

 was in a fury. Laden with great masses of 

 flakes it bore them in horizontal lines over fields 

 and pastures, hurling them against every obsta- 

 cle, and whitening even the window panes of 

 houses facing eastward. The blast was as unin- 



