SNOW 17I 
on the bare branches, thickly studded with buds, 
cling airily the small, light cones of last year’s 
growth, each crowned with a little ball of soft 
snow, four times taller than itself, — save where 
some have drooped sideways, so that each car- 
ries, poor weary Atlas, a sphere upon its back. 
Thus the coy creatures play cup and ball, and 
one has lost its plaything yonder, as the branch 
slightly stirs, and the whole vanishes in a whirl 
of snow. Meanwhile a fragment of low arbor- 
vitze hedge, poor outpost of a neighboring plan- 
tation, is so covered and packed with solid drift, 
inside and out, that it seems as if no power of 
sunshine could ever steal in among its twigs 
and disentangle it. 
In winter each separate object interests us ; 
in summer, the mass. Natural beauty in winter 
is a poor man’s luxury, infinitely enhanced in 
quality by the diminution in quantity. Winter, 
with fewer and simpler methods, yet seems to 
give all her works a finish even more delicate 
than that of summer, working, as Emerson says 
of English agriculture, with a pencil, instead of 
a plough. Or rather, the ploughshare is but 
concealed ; since a pithy old English preacher 
has said that “the frost is God’s plough, which 
he drives through every inch of ground in the 
world, opening each clod, and pulverizing the 
whole.” 
