The Project Gutenberg EBook of Yankee Gypsies, by John Greenleaf Whittier

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Title: Yankee Gypsies

Author: John Greenleaf Whittier

Posting Date: August 10, 2008 [EBook #878]
Release Date: April, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YANKEE GYPSIES ***

Produced by Anthony J. Adam

YANKEE GYPSIES

by John Greenleaf Whittier

"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets;
Here's to all the wandering train."
BURNS.(1)

I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences." (2) I profess
no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman
known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the
behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the
church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go
to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are
frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen
air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined
feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes glancing above the
uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her _yashmak;_(3)
schoolboys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold
brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of
glittering snow, or blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof: there is
nothing in all this to complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming
sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the
western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered
by exploding thunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their
varieties,--sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter
of sign and casement, hurricane puffs, and down-rushing rain-spouts. But
this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem
too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of
the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above, reminding one of
that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal
Priessnitz(4) administers his hydropathic torment,--

"A heavy, cursed, an