he twenty-four left to
me in which my feet may cross the boundary of human life into the world
of the other creatures; for I have gone into business in town to
gratify Georgiana. I think little enough of this business otherwise.
Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual
satisfaction in it than I feel an intellectual satisfaction in passing
my legs through my pantaloons of a morning. But a man can study
nothing in nature that does not outreach his powers.

If time is left, I veer off from the barn to the wood-pile, for I love
to wield an axe, besides having a taste to cut my own wood for the
nightly burning. This evening I could but stop to notice how the
turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous black nutgalls on the
limbs, except that the wind whisked their tails about as cheerily as
though they were already hearth-brooms.

It is well for my poor turkeys that their tails contain no moisture;
for on a night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least
incautious movement of a fowl in the morning would serve to crack its
tail off--up to the pope's-nose.

As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two
snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the
porch--the guardian spirits of our portal. There they were, wedged
each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their
feathers, and leaving but one side exposed. Happening to have some
wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge;
they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning.
Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine
the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering
gray--the no less fit external for a man.

The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit
of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and
listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled
down. I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given
up along with my other studies.

This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in
Kentucky--the memory of the white man, which goes back some
three-quarters of a century. Twice the Ohio River has been frozen
over, a sight he had never seen. The thermometer has fallen to thirty
degrees below zero. Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three
railroads we have in the State.

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