United States or Luxembourg ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For a time all was quiet, and I had begun to doze, when suddenly the coals flew all over me, and I opened my eyes just in time to see a great gray wolf spring out of the fire and bound up the snowbank. I leaped to my feet and peered into the darkness, where I could see scores of dark shadows moving about, and a black cluster gathered under my saddle.
Big Bill waltzed him over the floor, regardless of his good-humored protest. "Tell us some more, Dud," demanded the cook. "Did yore friend Rumpty put hisse'f out by sittin' in a snowbank?" "I don't rightly recollect. Me 'n' Bob here was elected to lead the grand march an' we had to leave Rumpty-Tumpty be his own fire department.
All this while "Aunt Sue's snowbank" lifted in dun clouds a degree or two above the horizon in the southeast of a morning or a night and disappeared again. Who Aunt Sue was or why the snowbank should be hers is more than I know, but her snowbank thus appears in the sky before a coming winter storm, and has been known as such to the country folk of my neighborhood for many generations.
I believe that the Creator was thinking, when He planned it, as much of little boys and girls and poets as of the husbandman and craftsman. Echo loves to imitate our voice as much as we love to hear it; and shadows love to caricature our forms that we may laugh and even assist them; for if you stretch an arm between the sun and a snowbank shadow aids you with its comic pencil.
And yet such is the mystery of Providence no one would expect that one of the sweetest and most delicate flowers that blooms, the trailing. arbutus, would blossom in this inhospitable climate, and peep forth from the edge of a snowbank at that.
Then, when the autumn comes, how they stand out in company with cedar bushes and sheep laurel on the hillsides to make beautiful the winter garden, and we stand in mute admiration when these white birches reach from a snowbank and pencil their frosty tracery against a wall of hemlocks. This is the simple material that has been used with such wonderful effect.
Next with his knife he cut a lot of light poles and scrub spruces and, sticking the butts in his snowbank, laid the tops, like the sticks of a wigwam, firmly against the big stub.
But though the day is clear and the sun bright, Aunt Sue's snowbank is lifting its purple mass in the southeast again and, with the other Dorchester backwoodsmen, I am wagging my head solemnly and joining in a jeremiad concerning a big one next time. I should like to have known Aunt Sue. I picture her as a stout, keen-eyed, wise-headed house-mother of the old English stock.
It instantly sent up a loud cry of fear and rage, which its mates seemed to regard as a battle cry, for they all fell on the rash invaders of their realm at once. As the boys dashed down the snowbank into the rookery, with their revolvers drawn, the professor, with a loud yell, fell backward into a well-filled nest.
Word Of The Day