Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/89

78 General Jackson,—not the most jocose of American Presidents,—advised a foreign lady not to take the trouble to go sleighing on a New England winter day. He could tell her how to do the thing without leaving the premises. She had only to sit still in the porch, with her feet in a tub of ice, with an attendant at each side, to ring a bell at one ear, and blow the bellows into the other. He omitted the considerations of the landscape, the rapid motion, the merry companionship, and the difference between the dinner-bell and the musical tinkle of harness bells. But in our park, the ladies on foot have all the advantages of the occasion, except the gliding motion of the ice-chair, while exercise is requisite to enable them to bear the keenness of the wind. After having seen what everybody could do, from the squire’s sons who skated geometrical figures, to the cottager’s little one who could tumble down and get up again without crying, we finally start on a brisk march to the moor.

As we leave the concourse in the park behind us, we remark the sharpness of every sound. The shout and the laugh from the throng, the striking of the church clock, the crack of the waggoner’s whip,—all have a metallic tone which is peculiar to such a temperature. Some customary sounds are absent, too. The mill is stopped, we see as we pass. Prodigious icicles are hanging from the water-wheel. Everything that should wave and wag in the air is still. Every twig is encased in ice; and even the hips and haws that remain shine red through glass. If we switch the hedge as we pass, we send a shower of shivered ice down to the ditch, and the birds rush away, frightened at the clatter. The cattle seem to be the most perplexed. Surely they must have had drink given them at home; yet some are snuffing about the pond in the field where the blue surface looks like very still water. Their breath wreathes along the surface; their noses flinch from the cold; but they try again, and then look round them with a pathetic low of complaint. Off scamper Ned and Charley to break the edge for them; and we are half a mile forward before they overtake us.

They find us talking of a frost-music, which I consider the most moving of all Nature’s melodies. I was once belated in Canada, on a fine winter day, and was riding over the hard snow on the margin of a wide lake, when the most faint and mournful wail that could break a solemn silence seemed to pass through me like a dream. I stopped my horse and listened. For some time I could not satisfy myself whether the music was in the air or in my own brain. I thought of the pine forest, which was not far off: but the tone was not harp-like; and there was not a breath of wind. Then it swelled and approached; and then it seemed to be miles away in a moment; and again it moaned, as if under my very feet. It was, in fact, almost under my feet. It was the voice of the winds imprisoned under the pall of ice suddenly cast over them by the peremptory power of the frost. Nobody there had made air holes, for the place was a wilderness; and there was no escape for the winds, which must moan on till the spring warmth should release them. They were fastened down in silence; but they would come out with an explosion when, in some still night, after a warm spring day, the ice would blow up, and make a crash and a racket from shore to shore. So I was told at my host’s that evening, where I arrived with something of the sensation of a haunted man. It had been some time before the true idea struck me; and meanwhile the rising and falling moan made my very heart thrill again.

After this, everybody wants to listen at the pools on the moor; but even our most rapid frosts falling on our broadest sheets of water, cannot produce that Canadian music. There is always some margin or chink left, and the freezing process is more gradual. So the lads all propose to go to Canada, by-and-bye.

We find a pool that harbours leeches; and we obtain two or three leeches preserved in ice. They are packed in ice and moss, to try their fate in Harry’s hands. There is still some running water, we find,—the little spring-head that I have never seen stopped; and there we find wagtails still hopping about and balancing themselves on the slippery stones.

If we could spend twenty-four hours here, and see without being seen, we might get a view of almost every living creature that dwells within a wide circuit;—of all, I mean, who must drink to live. To such a runnel as this, not only do all the birds of the woods, and the hedges, and the furrows, and the reeds come to drink; not only these and the cattle and sheep and dogs, but the wild creatures from the earth, and the water, and the air;—all that are not in their winter sleep, or kept at home by man, resort to the running waters last spared by the frost. Hence, as my wife reminds us, the gifts of woodcocks and snipes that come in after some continuance of seasonable weather in January; and hence also, the girls add, the influx of pet birds, and dead and dying birds, into all the cottages round in a sharp midwinter.

The country-boys, whose proper work is stopped by the frost, turn sportsmen in their way. They lie in ambush with net or sieve near such a spring-head as this, and clap their apparatus down upon their victims. It is almost a relief to hear of bird-pies, at such a time, instead of seeing the little prisoners die off from mismanagement. Certainly, if we enjoy lark puddings, other people may relish pies of other small birds; but, on the whole, one would rather the whole company of little birds were left to try their chance of getting through the winter. We, at all events, shall let them sip at their spring, and go and come in peace.

This bitter cold weather is the time for the wild creatures to show themselves boldly. We have not to tremble within our own doors at the howling of the wolf, as many inhabitants of foreign countries have. There the mountaineer, or the farmer among the moors, or, as now in Virginia, the settler among lapsed plantations, hears the wild howl from the rock or the waste, and knows that the creature is savage with hunger. We have not to fear for our own throats, when out in such nights, but we have to keep a keen watch over our young animals, and especially the poultry. Foxes, weasels, strange dogs and cats intrude