ve first.

But, after all, there are at least two or three things about that
weather (or, if you please, the effects produced by it) which we
residents would not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching
autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one
feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries--the ice storm.
Every bough and twig is strung with ice beads, frozen dewdrops, and the
whole tree sparkles cold and white like the [v]Shah of Persia's diamond
plume. Then the wind waves the branches, and the sun comes out and turns
all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and
flash with all manner of colored fires; which change and change again,
with inconceivable rapidity, from blue to red, from red to green, and
green to gold. The tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of
dazzling jewels, and it stands there the [v]acme, the climax, the
supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating,
intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong. Month
after month I lay up hate and grudge against the New England weather;
but when the ice storm comes at last I say: "There, I forgive you now;
you are the most enchanting weather in the world."

MARK TWAIN.

=HELPS TO STUDY=

Mark Twain's humor was noted for exaggeration. Find examples of
exaggeration in this selection. Old Probabilities was the name
signed by a weather prophet of the period. How was he affected by
New England weather? At what point did Twain drop his fun and begin
a beautiful tribute to a New England landscape? How does the
tribute close?

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Three Men in a Boat--Jerome K. Jerome.
The House Boat on the Styx--John Kendrick Bangs.

[Illustration: Silence Deep and White]

THE FIRST SNOWFALL

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping fields and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

From sheds new roofed with Carrara
Came chanticleer's muffled crow,
The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down
And still fluttered down the snow.

I stood and watched by the window
That noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snowbirds,