in the winter's fiercest cold they
wrap the warm blanket of their bronze foliage about them. Nor do I
blame the Indians for investing them with strange powers. In the
sunshine of midday they may seem merely friendly little trees of
the pasture. If you will walk among them as dusk deepens you may
feel their commonplace characteristics slip from them and the deep
mystery of being begin to express itself. Then they seem like
tribes of the elder world, a connecting link perhaps between the
forest and the red men who but a few centuries ago inhabited it,
far more real at such a time than the shadowy memories of these
vanished inhabitants.

CHAPTER XXII

AUNT SUE'S SNOWBANK

For weeks the country folk, wise in weather lore, have been
shaking their heads of a morning or an evening and saying, "The
air is full of snow!" No one of them can tell you how he knows it,
but he knows. "It feels like snow," and that does not mean that
the air is of a certain coldness or chilliness, dampness or
dryness, though there is definite balance of these conditions when
we say it. It means that there is in it another quality, too
subtle to be defined, that touches some equally subtle sixth sense
which life in the open begets in most of us. Fulminate is full of
fire, but it needs a shock or sudden pressure to liberate it. So
as the northerly wind drifted steadily down from the Arctic with
no opposition in the air currents that would give the requisite
counter pressure, the sky held up its store and we all continued
to go forth, sniff, shake our heads and prophesy. The cold drifted
farther and farther south till Jacksonville recorded, shamefacedly
and reluctantly, the same freezing temperature that New York had.
All this while "Aunt Sue's snowbank" lifted in dun clouds a degree
or two above the horizon in the southeast of a morning or a night
and disappeared again. Who Aunt Sue was or why the snowbank should
be hers is more than I know, but her snowbank thus appears in the
sky before a coming winter storm, and has been known as such to
the country folk of my neighborhood for many generations. The
early English settlers of "the Dorchester back woods" brought with
them many a quaint proverb and local saying. Some of these you can
trace back to Shakespeare's day, and beyond. Others, like the
sturdy men that brought them, have no record in the Domesday Book,
but no doubt as long a lineage for all that. One of these proverbs
that is proba