cloud, and at setting stained the sky and the white waste with freezing
pink and violet. On such days the farmers and lumbermen came in to the
village stores, and made a stiff and feeble stir about their doorways, and
the school children gave the street a little life and color, as they went
to and from the Academy in their red and blue woollens. Four times a day
the mill, the shrill wheeze of whose saws had become part of the habitual
silence, blew its whistle for the hands to begin and leave off work,
in blasts that seemed to shatter themselves against the thin air. But
otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed.

Behind the black boles of the elms that swept the vista of the street with
the fine gray tracery of their boughs, stood the houses, deep-sunken in the
accumulating drifts, through which each householder kept a path cut from
his doorway to the road, white and clean as if hewn out of marble. Some
cross streets straggled away east and west with the poorer dwellings; but
this, that followed the northward and southward reach of the plain, was the
main thoroughfare, and had its own impressiveness, with those square white
houses which they build so large in Northern New England. They were all
kept in scrupulous repair, though here and there the frost and thaw of many
winters had heaved a fence out of plumb, and threatened the poise of the
monumental urns of painted pine on the gate-posts. They had dark-green
blinds, of a color harmonious with that of the funereal evergreens in their
dooryards; and they themselves had taken the tone of the snowy landscape,
as if by the operation of some such law as blanches the fur-bearing animals
of the North. They seemed proper to its desolation, while some houses of
more modern taste, painted to a warmer tone, looked, with their mansard
roofs and jig-sawed piazzas and balconies, intrusive and alien.

At one end of the street stood the Academy, with its classic facade and its
belfry; midway was the hotel, with the stores, the printing-office, and the