48 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



corners have such a chill in them, and the snow so soon 

 loses its maidenhood to become a mere drab, — " doing 

 shameful things,'' as Steele says of politicians, " without 

 being ashamed." I pine for the Quaker purity of my 

 country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those 

 winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often 

 are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be 

 unsightlier than those piebald fields where the coarse 

 brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of her 

 ragged ermine. But even when there is abundance of 

 snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many 

 good crusts as there used to be. When I first observed 

 this, I rashly set it to the account of that general - 

 degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same 

 melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself up- 

 on the attention and into the philosophy of middle life. 

 But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me 

 that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly 

 be blamed for giving way under more than three times 

 the weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians 

 would remember this in their arguments, and consider 

 that the man may slump through, with no fault of his 

 own, where the boy would have skimmed the surface in 

 safety, it would be better for all parties. However, 

 when you do get a crust that will bear, and know any 

 brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and 

 take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it 

 commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. 

 You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank 

 away after the last thaw, he built for himself the most 

 exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not " measure- 

 less to man " like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet 

 perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those 

 for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is 

 ■Frost! The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa 



