JANUARY DAYS

In these midwinter days, how muffled is the earth in its immaculate raiment, so disguised in whiteness that familiar places are strange, rough hollows smoothed to mere undulations, deceitful to the eye and feet, and level fields so piled with heaps and ridges that their owners scarcely recognize them. The hovel is as regally roofed as the palace, the rudest fence is a hedge of pearl, finer than a wall of marble, and the meanest wayside weed is a white flower of fairyland.

The woods, which frost and November winds stripped of their leafy thatch, are roofed again, now with an arabesque of alabaster more delicate than the green canopy that summer unfolded, and all the floor is set in noiseless pavement, traced with a shifting pattern of blue shadows. In these silent aisles the echoes are smothered at their birth. There is no response of airy voices to the faint call of the winter birds. The sound of the axe-stroke flies no farther than the pungent fragrance of the smoke that drifts in a blue haze from the chopper's fire. The report of the gun awakes no answering report, and each mellow note of the hound comes separate to the ear, with no jangle of reverberations.

Fox and hound wallow through the snow a crumbling furrow that obliterates identity of either trail, yet there are tracks that tell as plain as written words who made them. Here have fallen, lightly as snowflakes, the broad pads of the hare, white as the snow he trod; there, the parallel tracks of another winter masker, the weasel, and those of the squirrel, linking tree to tree. The leaps of a tiny wood-mouse are lightly marked upon the feathery surface to where there is the imprint of a light, swift pinion on either side, and the little story of his wandering ends—one crimson blood drop the period that marks the finis.

In the blue shadow at the bottom of that winding furrow are the dainty footprints of a grouse, and you wonder why he, so strong of wing, should choose to wade laboriously the clogging snow even in his briefest trip, rather than make his easy way through the unresisting air, and the snow-written record of his wayward wanderings tells not why. Suddenly, as if a mine had been sprung where your next footstep should fall and with almost as startling, though harmless effect, another of his wild tribe bursts upward through the unmarked white floor and goes whirring and clattering away, scattering in powdery ruin the maze of delicate tracery the snowfall wrought; and vanishes, leaving only an aerial pathway of naked twigs to mark his impetuous passage.

In the twilight of an evergreen thicket sits a great horned owl like a hermit in his cell in pious contemplation of his own holiness and the world's wickedness. But this recluse hates not sin, only daylight and mankind. Out in the fields you may find the white-robed brother of this gray friar, a pilgrim from the far north, brooding in the very face of the sun, on some stack or outlying barn, but he will not suffer you to come so near to him as will this solemn anchorite who stares at you unmoved as a graven image till you come within the very shadows of his roof.

Marsh and channel are scarcely distinguishable now but by the white domes of the muskrats' winter homes and here and there a sprawling thicket or button bush, for the rank growth of weeds is beaten flat, and the deep snow covers it and the channel ice in one unbroken sheet.

Champlain's sheltered bays and coves are frozen and white with snow or frost, and the open water, whether still or storm-tossed, black beneath clouds or bluer than the blue dome that arches it, looks as cold as ice and snow. Sometimes its steaming breath lies close above it, sometimes mounts in swaying, lofty columns to the sky, but always cold and ghostly, without expression of warmth or life.

So far away to hoary peaks that shine with a glittering gleam against the blue rim of the sky, or to the furthest bluegray line of woodland that borders the horizon, stretches the universal whiteness, so coldly shines the sun from the low curve of his course, and so chilly comes the lightest waft of wind from wheresoever it listeth, that it tasks the imagination to picture any land on all the earth where spring is just awakening fresh life, or where summer dwells amid green leaves and bright flowers, the music of birds and running waters, and of warm waves on pleasant shores, or autumn yet lingers in the gorgeousness of many hues. How far off beyond this world seems the possibility of such seasons, how enduring and relentless this which encompasses us.

And then, at the close of the brief white day, the sunset paints a promise and a prophecy in a blaze of color on the sky. The gray clouds kindle with red and yellow fire that burns about their purple hearts in tints of infinite variety, while behind them and the dark blue rampart of the mountains flames the last glory of the departing sun, fading in a tint of tender green to the upper blue. Even the cold snow at our feet flushes with warm color, and the eastern hills blush roseate against the climbing, darkening shadow of the earth.

It is as if some land of summer whose brightness has never been told lay unveiled before us, its delectable mountains splendid with innumerable hues, its lakes and streams of gold rippling to purple shores seeming not so far before us but that we might, by a little journey, come to them.