292 Walks in New England 



And when his hours are numbered, and the world 

 Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, 

 Leaves when the sun appears astonished Art 

 To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, 

 Built in an age the mad wind s night-work, 

 The frolic architecture of the snow. 



Never before within the memory of the oldest 

 inhabitant has the &quot; fierce artificer &quot; drawn so 

 liberally from the crystal stone of his &quot;unseen 

 quarry &quot; in this region. Not 30 or 40 years, but 

 60 or 70 years knows not the parallel of this storm. 

 On the hills, one or two thousand feet above us, 

 such storms are more frequent, while here we 

 have nothing like so tremendous a visitation. 

 The fall was three feet on a level, and the nearest 

 approach to that in the armory records is the 22 

 inches that fell in the storm of January 31, 1882. 

 William Smith of Pine Street remembers a snow 

 fall of four feet in the last part of March, when 

 he was a boy in Dalton, almost 80 years ago, but 

 then it did not blow. A lesser fall with such a 

 wind produces on the hills as great drifts as we 

 have now in the city, and moreover pounds and 

 presses the snow so close that oxen draw sleds 

 over the drifts. Here the drifts were nowhere 

 solid enough to bear even boys upon their surface, 

 and on snowshoes alone could one traverse the 

 wild scenery with freedom. If we are to have 



