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When I went to "the Centre," as we called it, I waited until I saw Grandma Thorndyke go down to the store, and then tapped at their door. I thought they might want me to bring them something. They were living in a little house by the public square, where the great sugar maples stand now. These trees were then little beanpoles with tufts of twigs at the tops.
The long twigs of the wall-trees, which had never been nailed up, or had been torn down by the snow and the blasts of winter, went trailing away in the moan of the fitful wind, and swung back as it sunk to a sigh. The currant and gooseberry bushes, bare and leafless, and 'shivering all for cold, neither reminded him of the feasts of the past summer, nor gave him any hope for the next.
Nature seemed herself, yet struck to dumbness. No breeze stirred the twigs overhead or the undergrowth through which they rode. Once, as the two, riding a little apart, turned suddenly together, up a ravine into thicker woods, they came upon a herd of deer, who stared on them without any movement that the eye could see.
But when the security of solitude permits these animals to unite in societies, and to possess, without too much fear, a pond or a stream, they then exhibit all their industry. They build very well arranged dwellings, although at first sight they look like mere piles of twigs, branches, and logs, heaped in disorder on a small dome of mud.
The sanguinary despot of the interior bloomed in the Buenos Ayrean cafés into a profound admirer of Rivadavia, Lavalle, and Paz, his ancient Unitarian enemies; Buenos Ayres, the Confederation, he loudly proclaimed, must have a Constitution; conciliation must supplant the iron-heeled tyranny under which the people had groaned so long; the very jaguar of the Pampa, said the Porteño wits, not yet wholly muzzled by the dread Mazorca, or Club, of Rosas, was to be stripped of his claws, and made to live on matagusano twigs and thistles!
A little later, along the great Susquehanna, I found in full bloom other trees of this same birch, beloved of boys and of girls for its aromatic bark. Certainly picturesque and bright, the little trees were a delight to the winter-wearied eye, the mahogany twigs and the golden catkins, held at poise over the water, being full of spring suggestion.
And then the dead branches and twigs that the trees had been too lazy to shed; short shrift for them on the first spring-cleaning night. Down they came, helter-skelter, and no notice taken of the tree's groaning, or its crackling cries of protest.
Not finding her there, he swung the beam in an ever widening circle around that district. Finally he saw a few freshly broken twigs, and scanned the scene with care.
The night wind stirs the tree-tops, twigs crack, bushes rustle, and before I know where I am, the morale has gone phut and I'm expecting the family ghost to come sneaking up behind me, making groaning noises.
A light frown ran over the river, the clouds stirred slowly, changing their aspect but not their place, as if they had turned ponderously over; and when the sudden movement had died out in a quickened tremor of the slenderest twigs, there was a short period of formidable immobility above and below, during which the voice of the thunder was heard, speaking in a sustained, emphatic and vibrating roll, with violent louder bursts of crashing sound, like a wrathful and threatening discourse of an angry god.
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