mand nothing in return. But, if I go into a white man's house at Albany, and ask for victuals and drink, they say, Where is your money?' and if I have none, they say, 'Get out, you Indian dog!' You see they have not yet learned those little things that we need no meetings to be instructed in, because our mothers taught us when we were children.”

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XXXIV.

NOVEMBER.

BY ELIZABETH STODDARD.'

MUCH have I spoken of the faded leaf;
Long have I listened to the wailing wind,

And watched it plowing through the heavy clouds; 10
For autumn charms my melancholy mind.

When autumn comes, the poets sing a dirge :'
The year must perish; all the flowers are dead;
The sheaves are gathered; and the mottled quail
Runs in the stubble, but the lark has fled!

Still, autumn ushers in the Christmas cheer,
The holly berries and the ivy tree:
They weave a chaplet for the Old Year's heir;
These waiting mourners do not sing for me.

I find sweet peace in depths of autumn woods,
Where grow the ragged ferns and roughened moss;

The naked, silent trees have taught me this—
The loss of beauty is not always loss!

XXXV.

THE SNOWSTORM.

BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.'

THE sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.
A chill, no coat, however stout,

Of homespun stuff could quite shut out,
A hard, dull bitterness of cold,

That checked, mid-vein, the circling race
Of lifeblood in the sharpened face,
The coming of the snowstorm told.
The wind blew east: we heard the roar
Of Ocean on his wintry shore,

And felt the strong pulse throbbing there
Beat with low rhythm our inland air.
Meanwhile we did our nightly chores--
Brought in the wood from out-of-doors,
Littered the stalls, and from the mows
Raked down the herd's grass for the cows;
Heard the horse whinnying for his corn;
And, sharply clashing horn on horn,
Impatient down the stanchion' rows
The cattle shake their walnut bows;

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15

20

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While, peering from his early perch
Upon the scaffold's pole of birch,
The cock his crested helmet bent
And down his querulous' challenge sent.

Unwarmed by any sunset light

The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag wavering to and fro
Crossed and recrossed the winged snow:
And, ere the early bedtime came,

The white drift piled the window frame,
And through the glass the clothesline posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
So all night long the storm roared on;
The morning broke without a sun;
In tiny spherule' traced with lines
Of Nature's geometric signs,
In starry flake and pellicle,*
All day the hoary meteor fell;
And when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below-
A universe of sky and snow!
The old familiar sights of ours

Took marvelous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corncrib stood,

Or garden wall, or belt of wood;

A smooth white mound the brush pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;

The bridle post an old man sat

With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well curb has a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep,' high aloof,
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa's leaning miracle.'

XXXVI.

A SNOWSTORM.

BY JOHN BURROUGHS.'

THAT is a striking line with which Emerson' opens his beautiful poem of the Snowstorm:

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight.'

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One seems to see the clouds puffing their cheeks as they sound the charge of their white legions. But the line is more accurately descriptive of a rain-storm, as, in both summer and winter, rain is usually preceded by wind.15 Homer, describing a snowstorm in his time, says:

"The winds are lulled." 3

The preparations of a snowstorm are, as a rule, gentle and quiet; a marked hush pervades both the earth and the sky. The movements of the celestial forces are muffled, as if the snow already paved the way of their coming. There is no uproar, no clashing of arms, no blowing of wind trumpets. These soft, feathery, exquisite crystals are formed as if in the silence and pri

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vacy of the inner cloud-chambers. Rude winds would break the spell and mar the process. The clouds are smoother and slower in their movements, with less definite outlines than those which bring rain. In fact, everything is prophetic of the gentle and noiseless meteor that is approaching, and of the stillness that is to succeed it, when "all the batteries of sound are spiked," as Lowell' says, and "we see the movements of life as a deaf man sees it—a mere wraith' of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is 10 bare." After the storm is fairly launched, the winds not infrequently awake, and seeing their opportunity, pipe the flakes a lively dance. I am speaking now of the typical, full-born midwinter storm that comes to us from the north or north northeast, and piles the land-15 scape knee-deep with snow. Such a storm came to us the last day of January-the master-storm of the winter. Previous to that date we had had but light snow. The spruces had been able to catch it all upon their arms and keep a circle of bare ground beneath them, where 20 the birds scratched. But the day following this fall they stood with their lower branches completely buried. If the Old Man of the North had but sent us his couriers and errand boys before. The old graybeard appeared himself at our doors on this occasion, and we were 25 all his subjects. His flag was upon every tree and roof, his seal upon every door and window, and his embargo upon every path and highway. He slipped down upon us, too, under the cover of such a bright, seraphic' day— a day that disarmed suspicion with all but the wise 80 ones, a day without a cloud or a film, a gentle breeze from the west, a dry, bracing air, a blazing sun that brought out the bare ground under the lee of the fences and farm buildings, and at night a spotless moon near