and bright, and tingeing the white expanse with the faintest and most
ethereal rose-color. This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the
mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. It would seem as
if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively,
following it from its first phase, as an Indian track, until it reached
the dignity of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved into
a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it. The gigantic
swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man's metes and
bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human property.
So that now the traces of former times and hitherto accomplished deeds
being done away, mankind should be at liberty to enter on new paths, and
guide themselves by other laws than heretofore; if, indeed, the race be
not extinct, and it be worth our while to go on with the march of life,
over the cold and desolate expanse that lies before us. It may be,
however, that matters are not so desperate as they appear. That vast
icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the sunshine, must be the spire of
the meeting-house, incrusted with frozen sleet. Those great heaps, too,
which we mistook for drifts, are houses, buried up to their eaves, and
with their peaked roofs rounded by the depth of snow upon them. There,
now, comes a gush of smoke from what I judge to be the chimney of the
Ship Tavern;--and another--another--and another--from the chimneys of
other dwellings, where fireside comfort, domestic peace, the sports of
children, and the quietude of age are living yet, in spite of the frozen
crust above them.

But it is time to change the scene. Its dreary monotony shall not test
your fortitude like one of our actual New England winters, which leaves
so large a blank--so melancholy a death-spot-in lives so brief that they
ought to be all summer-time. Here, at least, I may claim to be ruler of
the seasons. One turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the