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.

News comes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New
York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a
hundred yards from the bank.

Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown,
destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants. It
set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that
to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me
occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how
one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild
beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins
of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding
for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had
opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a
buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a
wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer