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"I dunno how I made it ter Ma'am Kittridge's but I done it! The old lady seen the plight I was in, and she made me sit down by the kitchen fire just like I was. Wouldn't let me take off a thing. "She het up some kinder hot tea like ter burnt all the skin off my tongue and throat, I swow!" pursued Walky. "Must ha' drunk two quarts of it, an' gradually it begun ter thaw me out from the inside.
He knew that his case was hopeless, and he would not thaw even to the priest.
I was rather sleepless last night, owing to cramp from a drenched blanket, and got up about midnight and walked over to the remains of one of our niggers' fires. Crouching over the embers I found a bearded figure, which hoarsely denounced me for coming to its fire. I explained that it was our fire, but that he was welcome, and settled down to thaw.
The winds from the south, though colder, are nearly always coincident with sunny days and clear blue skies." The temperature still continued to rise, reaching 33° Fahr. on November 14. The thaw consequent upon these high temperatures was having a disastrous effect upon the surface of our camp. "The surface is awful! not slushy, but elusive. You step out gingerly.
It scarcely deserved the name. There was no fire there to thaw his chilled and trembling frame no light to gleam athwart the darkness, and send forth its pilgrim rays to meet him and guide his footsteps to his threshold. No wife, no children, waited eagerly his return. It was the miser's home dark, desolate, stern, and repulsive.
Harte's last letter, that many of my letters to you and him, have been frozen up on their way to Leipsig; the thaw has, I suppose, by this time, set them at liberty to pursue their journey to you, and you will receive a glut of them at once. Hudibras alludes, in this verse, "Like words congealed in northern air,"
The late mildness of the weather, however, having caused a thaw to take place below, it now became necessary immediately to scrape off the coating of ice, and it will, perhaps, be scarcely credited, that we this day removed about one hundred buckets full, each containing from five to six gallons, being the accumulation which had taken place in an interval of less than four weeks.
Her only thoughts of trouble were, that her father's body lay unburied, and that Borland would come and take her away. When the thaw came at last, the laird had the coffin brought again into the guest-chamber, and there placed on trestles, to wait the coming of the new Lord Mergwain. Outstripping the letter that announced his departure, he arrived at length, and with him his man of business.
The trail led through dry sloughs from which the advancing thaw had removed the snow in great patches. Sometimes the sled had to be hauled over bare sand; sometimes wide detours had to be made to avoid such sand; sometimes pools of open water covered with only that night's ice lay across our path.
There had been excursions in the equipage of Richard, when with his four horses he had outstripped the winds, as it flew over the glassy ice which invariably succeeded a thaw. Then the exciting and dangerous whirligig would be suffered to possess its moment of notice.