16 
RURAL HOURS. 
world ; broad openings of brown earth are seen everywhere, in 
the fields and on the hill-sides. The roads are deep with mud ; 
the stage-coaches are ten and eleven hours coming the twenty- 
two miles over the hills, from the railroad north of us. 
The Phcebe birds have arrived as well as the robins. In many 
parts of the country, their return is looked upon as the signal for 
beginning to make garden, but that would not do here ; there is 
too much frost in the ground for the spade. They are making 
hot-beds, however, in spite of the snow banks still lying in many 
gardens ; early lettuce and radishes are raised m this way, and 
both melons and tomatoes require to be helped forward by the 
same process to ripen their fruits thoroughly in this highland re- 
gion, 'iliere is a sort of tradition in the village, that the climate 
has undergone a degree of change since the arrival of the first 
colonists ; the springs are said to have become more uncertain, 
and the summers less warm ; so say elderly people who knew the 
place forty years since. The same remark is frequently heard, 
also, in settlements of about the same date as this, on the St. Law- 
rence, and the Genesee. But there may be some self-deception 
in the case, for we are naturally more apt to feel the frost of to- 
day, than that of last year, and memory may very possibly have 
softened the climate to those who look back from age to youth. 
There seems, however, some positive foundation for the assertion, 
since it is a fact well known, that fruits which succeeded here for- 
merly, are now seldom ripened. Water-melons were raised here 
without hot-beds forty years since, and a thriving little vineyard 
existed on the 'same spot where the grapes have been cut off by 
frost every season for the last ten years. 
Friday, 24-th. — The first plant that shows the influence of the 
