Ill 



A SPRING RELISH 



IT is a little remarkable how regularly 

 severe and mild winters alternate in our 

 climate for a series of years, a feminine 

 and a masculine one, as it were, almost 

 invariably following each other. Every 

 other season now for ten years the ice- 

 gatherers on the river have been disap- 

 pointed of a full harvest, and every other 

 season the ice has formed from fifteen to 

 twenty inches thick. From 1873 to 1884 

 there was no marked exception to this rule. 

 But in the last-named year, when, according 

 to the succession, a mild winter was due, 

 the breed seemed to have got crossed, and 

 a sort of mongrel winter was the result ; 

 neither mild nor severe, but very stormy, 

 capricious, and disagreeable, with ice a foot 

 thick on the river. The winter which fol- 

 lowed, that of 1884-85, though slow and 

 hesitating at first, fully proved itself as be- 

 longing to the masculine order. The pres- 

 ent winter of 1885-86 shows a marked 

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