CHAPTER XVIII 



OUT IN THE COLD 



THE first frost that touched us in the waning 

 October had gloves on. It was gentle and 

 uncertain. It left little filmy crystals, 

 exquisitely wrought, clinging helplessly close 

 along the still fringes of the pools. I under 

 stood by these first tiny shoots that winter germi 

 nated like spring, having its tender pellicles and 

 fragile blades ; the infancy, in fact, of its flower 

 ing life, afterward to bloom like a great camel 

 lia in snowdrifts, and come to its autumn of 

 falling icicles and asthmatic gusts. The first 

 efflorescence of the bleak season was, therefore, 

 curiously infantile. I had never had my atten 

 tion called to it before, and now it seemed as if 

 I had been in at the birth. It was like a new 

 intimacy with the old sovereign system. Per 

 haps there was in me some molecular response, 

 as there is in the capillary hearts of the oak and 

 the elm, where arcane saps rise and fall in the 



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