e
simply ought _not_ to live in such a place in winter; and of course, if
anything exactly like that should occur every winter night, I should
have to move into the city whether I liked city storms or not. One's
life is, to be sure, a consideration, but fortunately for life all the
winter days out here are not so magnificently ordered as this, except
at dawn each morning, and at dusk, and at midnight when the skies are
set with stars.

But there is a largeness to the quality of country life, a freshness
and splendor as constant as the horizon and a very part of it.

Take a day anywhere in the year: that day in March--the day of the
first frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall--the
day of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day in
August--the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumn
meet--_these_, together with the days of June, and more especially that
particular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, when
everything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pond
are moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay--the
day when spring and summer meet!

Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere in the calendar from the
rainy day in February when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the day
of floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets of wild lettuce and
silky-sailed fireweed on the golden air. The big soft clouds are
sailing their wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, the
chickadees and kinglets linger with you in your sheltered hollow
against the hill--you and they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep
before there breaks upon you the wrath of the North.

But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy day any nearer perfect
than that day when

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky
Arrives the snow"--

or the blizzard?

But going back to town, as she intimated, concerns the children quite
as much as me. They travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of
it on foot and part of it by street car--and were absent one day last
year when the telephone wires were down and we thought there would be
no school because of the snow. They might not have missed that one day
had we been in the city, and I must think of that when it comes time to
go back. There is room for them in the city to improve in spelling and
penmanship too, vastly to improve. But they could n't have half so
much fun the