A MODERN INSTANCE.


I.

The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They
were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their
serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and
beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses
and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long
curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward,
tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three
or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely
utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of
vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved
with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered
a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows
were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and
returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders
and white birches.

But winter was full half the year. The snow began at Thanksgiving, and
fell snow upon snow till Fast Day, thawing between the storms, and packing
harder and harder against the break-up in the spring, when it covered the
ground in solid levels three feet high, and lay heaped in drifts, that
defied the sun far into May. When it did not snow, the weather was
keenly clear, and commonly very still. Then the landscape at noon had a
stereoscopic glister under the high sun that burned in a heaven without a