all, but pre-spring, which, in spite of lengthening _days_,
is the only uncompromisingly disagreeable season in the country--the time
when measles usually invades the village school, the dogs come slinking
in guiltily to the fire, pasted with frozen mud, the boys have snuffle
colds, in spite of father's precautions, and I grow desperate and flout
the jonquils in my window garden, it seems so very long since summer, and
longer yet to real budding spring. We arrived at home last night in the
wildest snowstorm of the season, and this morning Evan, having smoothed
out his mental wrinkles by means of our mild city diversions, is now
filling his lungs and straightening his shoulders by building a wonderful
snow fort for the boys. Presently I shall go down to help them bombard
him in it, and try to persuade them that it will last longer if they do
not squeeze the snowballs too hard, for Evan has prohibited "baking"
altogether.

The "baking" of snowballs consists of making up quite a batch at once,
then dipping them in water and leaving them out until they are hard as
rocks, and really wicked missiles.

The process, unknown in polite circles here, though practised by the
factory town "muskrats," was taught my babies by the Vanderveer boy
during the Christmas holidays, which, being snowy and bright, drew the
colony to the Bluffs for coasting, skating, etc., giving father such a
river of senseless accidents to wade through that he threatens to absent
himself and take refuge with Martin Cortright in his Irving Place den for
holiday week next year. Father has ridden many a night when the roads
would not admit of wheeling, without thought of complaint, to the
charcoal camp to tend a new mother, a baby, or a woodchopper suddenly
stricken with pneumonia, that is so common a disease among men living as
these do on poor food, in tiny close cabins, and continually getting
checks of perspiration in the variable climate. During the holidays he
was called to the Bluffs in the middle of two consecutive nights, first
to the Vanderveers, and requested to "drug" the second assistant butler,
who was wildly drunk, and being a recent acquisition had been brought to
officiate at the house party without due trial, "so that he wouldn't be
used up the next day," and then to the Ponsonby's, where the family had
evidently not yet gone to bed. Here he found that the patient, a visiting
school friend of one of the daughters, from up the state, and evident