sleighs and sledges as
they went by in the road creaked on the snow, so that we heard them
through the double windows, and that was a sign; while the teamsters
swung their benumbed arms like the sails of a windmill to keep up the
circulation, and the frozen vapor puffed out from the horses' nostrils
in a manner reminding one of the snorting coursers in sensational
pictures. The schoolboys on their way from school did not stop to play,
and that was a sign. No women had been seen on the street since noon.
Young men, as they hurried past on the peculiar high-stepping trot
of persons who have their hands over their ears, looked strangely
antiquated with their mustaches and beards all grizzled with the frost.

Toward dusk I took a short run to the post-office. I was well wrapped
up, but that did not prevent me from having very singular sensations
before I got home. The air, as I stepped out from cover, did not seem
like air at all, but like some almost solid medium, whose impact was
like a blow. It went right through my overcoat at the first assault, and
nosed about hungrily for my little spark of vital heat. A strong wind
with the flavor of glaciers was blowing straight from the pole. How
inexpressibly bleak was the aspect of the leaden clouds that were banked
up around the horizon! I shivered as I looked at the sullen masses. The
houses seemed little citadels against the sky. I had not taken fifty
steps before my face stiffened into a sort of mask, so that it hurt
me to move the facial muscles. I came home on an undignified run,
experiencing a lively sense of the inadequacy of two hands to protect
two ears and a nose. Did the Creator intend man to inhabit high
latitudes?

At nightfall father, Bill, and Jim, the two latter being my younger
brothers, arrived from their offices, each in succession declaring, with
many "whews" and "ughs," that it was by all odds the coldest night yet.
Undeniably we all felt proud of it, too. A spirited man rather welcomes
ten or fifteen degrees extra, if so be they make the temperature
superlatively low; while he would very likely grumble at a much less
positive chilliness coupled with the disheartening feeling that he was
enduring nothing extraordinary. The general exaltation of spirit
and suspension of the conventionalities for the time being, which an
extraordinarily, hot or cold snap produces in a community, especially in
the country, is noteworthy. During that run of mine to the post-off