seldom lost or even veiled in this southern or semi-southern clime.

"Floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous,
Indolent sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,"

a description that would not apply with the same force farther north,
where the air seems thinner and less capable of absorbing and holding
the sunlight. Indeed, the opulence and splendor of our climate, at
least the climate of the Atlantic seaboard, cannot be fully appreciated
by the dweller north of the thirty-ninth parallel. It seemed as if I
had never seen but a second-rate article of sunlight or moonlight until
I had taken up my abode in the National Capital. It may be, perhaps,
because we have such splendid specimens of both at the period of the
year when one values such things highest, namely, in the fall and
winter and early spring. Sunlight is good any time, but a bright,
evenly tempered day is certainly more engrossing to the attention in
winter than in summer, and such days seem the rule, and not the
exception, in the Washington winter. The deep snows keep to the north,
the heavy rains to the south, leaving a blue space central over the
border States. And there is not one of the winter months but wears this
blue zone as a girdle.

I am not thinking especially of the Indian summer, that charming but
uncertain second youth of the New England year, but of regularly
recurring lucid intervals in the weather system of Virginia fall and
winter, when the best our climate is capable of stand
revealed,--southern days with northern blood in their veins,
exhilarating, elastic, full of action, the hyperborean oxygen of the
North tempered by the dazzling sun of the South, a little bitter in
winter to all travelers but the pedestrian,--to him sweet and