The Bay of the Band 
The frost-line back with tropic heat; 
And ever, when a louder blast 
Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
The merrier up its roaring draught 
The great throat of the chimney laughed. 
And, for the winter fireside meet, 
Between the andirons’ straddling feet, 
The mug of cider simmered slow, 
The apples sputtered in a row, 
And, close at hand, the basket stood 
With nuts from brown October’s wood. 
But you will be snow-bound in the morning and 
cannot get to town? Perhaps; but it happened so 
only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904. 
So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the 
poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were 
glad for a day at home that wasn’t Sunday, for a 
whole long day to pop corn with the boys. 
A farm, of all human habitations, is most of a 
home, and never so much of a home as in the winter 
when the stock and the crops are housed, when fur- 
row and boundary fence are covered, when earth and 
sky conspire to drive a man indoors and to keep him 
in, — where he needs to stay for a while and be quiet. 
No problem of city life is more serious than the 
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