Yankee Gypsies

by John Greenleaf Whittier




"Here's to budgets, packs, and wallets;
Here's to all the wandering train."
BURNS.(1)



I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to "skyey influences."
(2) I profess no indifference to the movements of that
capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I
cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal
bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire.
Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero
if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are
frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in
the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of
fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright eyes
glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the
folds of her *yashmak;*(3) schoolboys coasting down street
like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams
flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow, or blazing
upon ice jewelry of tree and roof: there is nothing in all this to
complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming
sublimities,--its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming