deaf man sees it,--a mere
wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears
when the ground is bare." After the storm is fairly launched the winds
not infrequently awake, and, seeing their opportunity, pipe the flakes
a lively dance. I am speaking now of the typical, full-born midwinter
storm that comes to us from the North or N. N. E., and that piles the
landscape knee-deep with snow. Such a storm once came to us the last
day of January,--the master-storm of the winter. Previous to that
date, we had had but light snow. The spruces had been able to catch
it all upon their arms, and keep a circle of bare ground beneath
them where the birds scratched. But the day following this fall, they
stood with their lower branches completely buried. If the Old Man of
the North had but sent us his couriers and errand-boys before, the old
graybeard appeared himself at our doors on this occasion, and we were
all his subjects. His flag was upon every tree and roof, his seal upon
every door and window, and his embargo upon every path and highway. He
slipped down upon us, too, under the cover of such a bright, seraphic
day,--a day that disarmed suspicion with all but the wise ones, a day
without a cloud or a film, a gentle breeze from the west, a dry,
bracing air, a blazing sun that brought out the bare ground under the
lee of the fences and farm-buildings, and at night a spotless moon
near her full. The next morning the sky reddened in the east, then
became gray, heavy, and silent. A seamless cloud covered it. The smoke
from the chimneys went up with a barely perceptible slant toward the
north. In the forenoon the cedar-birds, purple finches, yellowbirds,
nuthatches, bluebirds, were in flocks or in couples and trios about
the trees, more or less noisy and loquacious. About noon a thin white
veil began to blur the distant southern mountains. It was like a white
dream slowly descending upon them. The first flake or flakelet that
reached me was a mere white speck that came idly circling and eddying
to the ground. I could not see it after it alighted. It might have
been a scale from the feather of some passing bird, or a larger mote
in the air that the stillness was allowing to settle. Yet it was the
altogether inaudible and infinitesimal trumpeter that announced the
coming storm, the grain of sand that heralded the desert. Presently
another fell, then another; the white mist was creeping up the river
valley. How slowly and