ad
hardly downy with white, seem like a tale that is told, and we realize
that latitude does not unaided make temperature. It is only in
exceptional winters, after all, that we class for a brief spell with
Naples. Greenland and the polar stream are never long in asserting
their claim and Santa Claus's to unchecked progress to our hearths.

And now, when one comes to think of it, who would say them nay for
the sake of a ton of coal, or twenty? If one grows old, he is still
young in his children. There is the smallest tot at this very moment
sliding under my window with shrieks of delight, in the first fall of
the season, though the November election is barely a week gone, and
snowballing the hired girl in quite the fashion of the good old days,
with the grocer's clerk stamping his feet at the back gate and roaring
out his enjoyment at her plight in a key only Jack Frost has in
keeping. A hundred thousand pairs of boys' eyes are stealing anxious
glances toward school windows to-day, lest the storm cease before they
are let out, and scant attention is paid to the morning's lessons, I
will warrant. Who would exchange the bob-sled and the slide and the
hurricane delights of coasting for eternal summer and magnolias in
January? Not I, for one--not yet. Human nature is, after all, more
robust than it seems at the study fire. I never declared in the board
of deacons why I stood up so stoutly for the minister we called that
winter to our little church,--with deacons discretion is sometimes
quite the best part of valor,--but I am not ashamed of it. It was the
night when we were going home, and neighbor Connery gave us a ride on
his new bob down that splendid hill,--the whole board, men and
women,--that I judged him for what he really was--that resolute leg
out behind that kept us on our course as straight as a die, rounding
every log and reef with the skill of a river pilot, never flinching
once. It was the leg that did it; but it was, as I thought, an index
to the whole man.

Discomfort and suffering are usually the ideas associated with deep
winter in a great city like New York, and there is a deal of
it--discomfort to us all and suffering among the poor. The mere
statement that the Street-Cleaning Department last winter carted away
and dumped into the river 1,679,087 cubic yards of snow at thirty
cents a yard, and was then hotly blamed for leaving us in the slush,
fairly measures the one and is enough to set the taxpayer to