THANKFUL BLOSSOM

by BRET HARTE




I


The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New
Jersey.

It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the
mud of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's
wayfaring on the Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry,
the deep ruts left by baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn
by artillery, lay stark and cold in the waning light of an April
day. There were icicles on the fences, a rime of silver on the
windward bark of maples, and occasional bare spots on the rocky
protuberances of the road, as if Nature had worn herself out at the
knees and elbows through long waiting for the tardy spring. A few
leaves disinterred by the thaw became crisp again, and rustled in
the wind, making the summer a thing so remote that all human hope
and conjecture fled before them.

Here and there the wayside fences and walls were broken down or
dismantled; and beyond them fields of snow downtrodden and
discolored, and strewn with fragments of leather, camp equipage,
harness, and cast-off clothing, showed traces of the recent