London to John O 1 Groat's. 261 



left behind. This looks full of luxuriant life, as green 

 as his in May. It has three months' start of his dead 

 and buried crop. He walks across it ; his shoes sink 

 almost to the instep in the soft soil. He sees birds 

 hopping about in it without overcoats. Surely, he says 

 to himself, this is a favored land. Here it lies on the 

 latitudes of Labrador, and yet its midwinter fields are 

 as green as ours in the last month of spring. At this 

 rate the farmers here must harvest their wheat before the 

 ears of mine are formed. But he counts without Nature. 

 The American sun overtakes and distances the English 

 by a full month. Here is the compensation for six 

 consecutive months in which the New England farmer 

 must house his plough and not turn a furrow. 



Doubtless, as much light and heat brighten and 

 warm one country as the other in the aggregate of 

 a year. But there is a great difference in the economy 

 of distribution. In England, the sun spreads its 

 warmth more evenly over the four seasons of the 

 year. What it witholds from Summer it gives to 

 Winter, and makes it wear the face of Spring through 

 its shortest and coldest days. But then Spring loses 

 a little from this equalising dispensation. It is not 

 the resurrection from death and the grave as it is in 

 America. Children are not waiting here at the 

 sepulchre of the season, as with us, watching and listening 



