like a chimney that draws well some days and won't draw at all on
others, and the secret is mainly in the condition of the
atmosphere. Anything positive and decided with the weather is a
good omen. A pouring rain may be more auspicious than a sleeping
sunshine. When the stove draws well, the fogs and fumes will leave
your mind.
I find there is great virtue in the bare ground, and have been much
put out at times by those white angelic days we have in winter,
such as Whittier has so well described in these lines:--

"Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament;
No cloud above, no earth below,
A universe of sky and snow."

On such days my spirit gets snow-blind; all things take on the same
color, or no color; my thought loses its perspective; the inner
world is a blank like the outer, and all my great ideals are
wrapped in the same monotonous and expressionless commonplace. The
blackest of black days are better.

Why does snow so kill the landscape and blot out our interest in
it? Not merely because it is cold, and the symbol of death,--for I
imagine as many inches of apple blossoms would have about the same
effect,--but because it expresses nothing. White is a negative; a
perfect blank. The eye was made for color, and for the earthy
tints, and, when these are denied it, the mind is very apt to
sympathize and to suffer also.

Then when the sap begins to mount in the trees, and the spring