24 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



streets; for one glorious morning the drab pattern of the 

 town would disappear beneath the soft, clean blanket. 

 But then would come the slush, the blackening, the 

 spatter. The country boy grew homesick for the sound 

 of sleighbells, for the rush of sleds, for the great sweep 

 of the storm over mountain walls and the long weeks of 

 blue shadows on the silent fields, for all the unexpur- 

 gated drama of the snowy season. It was not the sum- 

 mer heat that drove him from New York, for that he 

 always had contrived to escape. It was much more the 

 snowless Winter, Winter without the dramatic entrance 

 of the storm, Winter without the happy ending of 

 silver brooks alive in every road and finally of vanishing 

 wisps of white drift behind pasture walls, melting like 

 clouds before the winds of Spring. 



When you were a little boy did they tell you that 

 when it snowed the old woman up in the sky was 

 shaking out her feather bed? It was an appealing 

 fancy, and I sometimes wonder what is its modern sub- 

 stitute now that feather beds have passed. It was a 

 great joy, surely, when the first storm began, to stand 

 with upturned face and watch the great flakes come 

 down out of a white sky, assuming a separate indi- 

 viduality quite suddenly, about ten or fifteen feet 

 above your head. Your eyes would unconsciously 

 pick out a particularly large flake as it separated itself 

 from the blur of the descending thousands, and you 

 would watch it flutter easily to earth, sometimes with 



