out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather for
the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a
mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the
edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, "Did you hear the
frogs last night?" That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his
childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves. It fills one with
sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is
a strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and
warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his
better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring
multiply. The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant
leaning on the area-gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the
other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but
true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to
protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, "How sweet it is to
be with those we love to be with!"

All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early
buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, "Twenty feet of snow at
Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow
still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron."

Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?
Before noon it rains, by three o'clock it hails; before night the
bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging,
whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is drifted in
banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the seventeenth century,
Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass. Before that, men had
suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering. A century
later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and
Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds a new because distinct
terror to the weather. Science names and registers the ills of life; and
yet it is a gain to know the names and habits of our enemies. It is with
some satisfaction in our knowledge that we say the thermometer marks
zero.

In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken
possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has
retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it
is better to have it now than later. We have a conceit of