Scolding

“ THE SLEDGE. It is a cold winter morning, and the children are amusing themselves by riding in a sledge over the frozen snow. The birds are huddling together on the bare branches, as if they felt the cold very keenly. It is pleasant, no doubt, for the riders, but whether it is for our little friend who is drawing the sledge, I am not sure. At all events, it will warm him this cold morning, and that will no doubt do him good. ”

“ In field and forest the Seven Sleepers slept safe and warm until spring, but the rest of the wild folk were not at truce with winter but, hunger-driven, must play at hide-and-seek with foe and food. Everywhere on the surface of the snow the writings of their foot-prints appeared and reappeared, as they were swept away by the wind or blotted out by the falling flakes. ”

“ Again the sky was full of birds. Those last of the day-flyers were the swallow-folk. White-bellied tree swallows; barn swallows, with long forked tails; cliff swallows, with cream-white foreheads; bank and rough-winged swallows, with brown backs—the air was full of their whirling, curving flight. With them went their big brothers, the purple martins, and the night hawks, with their white-barred wings, which at times, as they whirled downward, made a hollow twanging noise. With the flock, too, were the swifts, who sleep and nest in chimneys, and whose winter home no man yet has discovered. ”

“ On that bright summer a hard winter followed. The poor suffered very much; and I in the closed lattice knew scarcely which was the worse—the icy, shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or the close, noxious suffocation of the stove.
I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life during that bitter cold weather, when the panes of the lattice were all blocked from week’s end to week’s end with the solid, silvery foliage of the frost. ”

“ The hotter it is, the colder I am, and the frost pierces through all my bones; and the colder it is, the hotter I am. In the midst of ice, I cannot endure the heat, nor in the midst of fire, the cold." "Thou art a strange fellow!" said the prince, "but if thou wilt enter my service, follow me." ”

“ In the winter time, when deep snow lay on the ground, a poor boy was forced to go out on a sledge to fetch wood. When he had gathered it together, and packed it, he wished, as he was so frozen with cold, not to go home at once, but to light a fire and warm himself a little. ”

“ The detonations of the frost
Come dumbed and softened to their ears.
Sleeping, they smile as children do,
Secure of shield and covering,
And trust the Promise, proved and true,
The unforgetting pledge of spring. [86]
Their veins a slumbering pulse informs,
The life within them stirs and grows,
And fed and sheltered so by storms,
They wait content beneath the snows.
Life has its storms; its hard, cold days,
When blasts of grief and frosts of care
Drift in upon the happy ways,
And blight the blooms that made them fair. ”

“ Life was a bitter, losing fight against cold and hunger for many of the wood-dwellers; but, six feet underground, the bear slept safe, at truce with both of these ancient foes of the wild folk, while the warm vapor of her breath, freezing, sealed the sides of her cell with solid ice. ”

“ It struck a chill—there was a great deal that was chill in that place of hot fears, cold passions, joyless content and light-hearted sloth—a place where one’s skin crept clammily while the bones were burning. ”

“ But, alas! the wind gets up, and there is no shelter of any kind here. On a calm day one can walk and keep warm with the thermometer far below zero. But with a cutting wind the cold and the suffering are a terrible punishment. ”

“ In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left no room for argument. ”

“ In the middle of the night the cold was bitter, so cold that I had icicles hanging on my moustache and eyelashes. It was impossible to remain on the camels, and ill as we all felt we had to walk—drag ourselves would be a more suitable expression—to keep ourselves from freezing. On these cold nights we simply longed for the sun to come out. ”

“ Nobody answers, and up speaks the U. S. man again.
"You've got your nerve, to ask a man out on such a night."
"If there was one here, I wouldn't have to ask him. There's people freezing within five miles of here, and you hug the stove, saying: 'It's stormy, and we'll get cold.' Of course it is. If it wasn't stormy they'd be here too, and it's so cold, you'll probably freeze. ”

“ As the shifting tints deepened into the unvarying peacock-blue of a Northern night, the evening star flared like a lamp hung low in the west while the dark strode across the shadows of the forest, cobalt-blue against the drifted snow. As the winter stars flamed into the darkening sky, a tide of night-life flowed and throbbed under the silent trees. One by one the wild folk came forth, to live and love and die in this their day, even as we humans in ours. ”

“ After the lapse of perhaps an hour, possibly more, I felt the ground beneath my feet, and staggering out of the water, I flung myself upon the dry land, and, notwithstanding the howling of the wind and the roar of the breakers, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. ”

“ That night the temperature rose, until the very breath of spring seemed to be in the air; and early the next morning, before even the faint glimmer of the dawn-dusk had shown, I was awakened by hearing a croon so soft and sweet that it ran for long through my dreams without waking me. Again and again it sounded, like the singing ripple of a trout brook or the happy little cradle-song that a mother ruffed grouse makes when she broods her leaf-brown chicks. ”

“ Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow. ”

“ As I lay sprawled among the bushes, whose dry leaves and twigs pricked and irritated my skin, I was prey to countless vexations. The night was cold, and I shivered as the wind cut through my thin garments; the night was long, and I almost groaned with impatience while the slow constellations crawled across the heavens; the night was dark, and fantastic fears flitted through my mind as I gazed through the gloom toward the ghostly line of the trees and cabins. ”

“ By the time frost had come, his fur had grown long and glossy and very beautiful, with the velvet cross of midnight-black bordered with old-gold, silver, and tawny-pink, his black brush waving aloft like a white-tipped plume.
Death came with the frost, in the form of traps, hounds and hunters. Old Father Fox taught him how to escape them all. ”

“ Worn out with hunger and fatigue, we threw ourselves on the frozen ground with no covering save the heavens, which were very cold that night; dressed, the most of us, in summer blouses with no underclothing, it was one continuous shiver till the rising sun gladdened our eyes and warmed our bodies. ”

“ We hug each our own fireside; but this is because, for eight months of the year, the great cold gives us a habit of tension. We enjoy too little the elixir of our still winter days, and hurry, hurry as we go, to pop back to our warm hearths as fast as ever we can. ”

“ A chill creeps on, and frosty winds begin to howl across the freezing earth. Colder, and yet colder is the night. The vital blood at length, of all creatures stops congealed. Down goes the frost toward the earth’s centre. ”

“ Although I dwell in the regions of eternal frost and never-melting snows, yet would I that my bosom should feel the gentle flame; though my flesh be of the consistence and coldness of ice, I would feel the raging of a fire like that which exists in the bosoms of those who love to madness. ”

“ The cold’s got an edge like a jackknife — it must be forty below;
Leastways that’s what it seems like — it cuts so fierce to the bone.
The wind’s getting real ferocious; it’s heaving and whirling the snow ”

“ Men who have passed the winter in comfort and ample warmth have more vitality and endurance and will stand the strain and exposure of the spring sledge-journey better than men who have been uncomfortable and chilly through the winter. This is just as definite a proposition as that Eskimo dogs that have been well fed during the winter will stand the sledge-journey better than dogs that have been half fed. The ideas of toughening one’s self against the cold, of training for the sledge-journey, of inuring one’s self to scant rations, are fallacies. ”

“ This cold makes the sinner feel how ragged his garments are. He could strut about, when it was summer weather, and think his rags right royal robes, but now the cold frost finds out every rent in his garment, and in the hands of the terrible law he shivers like the leaves upon the aspen. The north wind of judgment searches the man through and through. ”

“ When the weasel saw the rabbit had stopped, its red eyes flamed, and with a flashing spring its teeth and claws were at poor bunny’s throat. There was a plaintive whinnying cry, and the reddened snow told the rest.
[Pg 58]
So the last story of the snow ended in tragedy, as do nearly all true stories of the wild-folk. Yet they need not our pity. Better a thousand times the quick passing at the end of a swift run or of a brave fight, than the long, long weariness of pain and sickness by which we humans so often claim our immortality. ”

“ Colder and more piercing grew the wind, till the cold seemed to strike to the marrow of every one’s bones, and their thick clothing did not seem to keep out the chill any more than coverings of paper. ”

“ At night, when the fatal sun had reluctantly disappeared in a mass of pink and violet clouds, the life-bringing breeze would blow in fresh and salt from the far-away sea, and all living creatures would revive. ”

“ Here in the freezing cold, or away in the deadly heat—n battle or in shipwreck—in the face of starvation, under the shadow of pestilence—I, though hundreds are falling round me, I shall live! live for the coming of one day! live for the meeting with one man! ”

“ And we can acknowledge and admire the bravery and faithfulness of the men of the sledge-parties who, for days and weeks, drew the sledges and their comrades, with gloom above and around them, ice and snow everywhere bounding the prospect, and in a temperature which seemed to freeze the blood and benumb the heart. ”

“ For a moment chaos reigned. Some enormous clouds, like huge blots of ink, swept through a host of smaller ones, which were scattered and floated like shreds of rag which the wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. ”

“ Through fog and fair, through frost and snow, through wind and rain, he trudged to that wretched house. No one minds the weather—no young Scotchman, at least—where any pleasure waits the close of the struggle: to fight his way to misery was more than he could well endure. ”

“ This air is intolerably cold, and the place quite solitary—I never go down to the Well without returning low-spirited; for there I meet with half a dozen poor emaciated creatures, with ghostly looks, in the last stage of a consumption, who have made shift to linger through the winter like so many exotic plants languishing in a hot house ”

“ The next morning, in the wet snow a new trail appeared—a long chain of slender delicate close-set tracks, like a pattern of intricate stitches. The last of the Sleepers was awake, for the close-set paw-prints were none other than those of the unhasting skunk. "Don't hurry, others will," is his motto. It was just at dawn of the second day of the thaw that he appeared in the sunlight. ”

“ Sitting in my cart of sorrow in summer sultriness I could feel the ineffable pure cold of winter strike my face at the mere thought, the ineffable pure cold that spurs the most languid mind into activity. ”

“ As in springtime, when you happen to stand at the shore and wait, in one more minute everything will move and pull and crack! But the minute passes and the ice remains motionless; you feel as though you yourself are swelling, your heart beats more restlessly, more frequently. ”

“ For nearly an hour we continued to bear up against it, struggling onward with increasing difficulties, sometimes falling, sometimes dashed back by the wind, with our clothes drenched in consequence of the snow melting upon us, and the cold of the atmosphere growing more intense as every minute of the night advanced. ”

“ The cold felt has little in common with the brisk, keen cold of a frosty day or that met with at a high altitude; but it has certain raw and penetrating properties, and the discomfort becomes hourly more acute, while at every moment the puddles suck and squelch beneath you, and fresh streams of colder water flow in from unexpected directions to chill you to the bone. ”

“ One night we couched on the floor of an old school-house, the next we crawled into an oat-shock and covered ourselves with straw. Let those who have never slept out on the ground through an August night say that it is impossible that one should be cold! ”

“ In a moment all his savage instincts were aroused. He flitted across the snow like a flash of moonlight, and, with a great leap, seized it by the neck. Mumbling and snarling, he devoured the poor bird. ”

“ In other parts, all things would verily be frightful and stark with extreme cold; whence all high places would be very rough, unfruitful, inaccessible, covered with a pall of perpetual shades and eternal night. ”

“ Look here, we will hang his plaid over the side of the cot, and when we light the candle in the night to see if he is covered properly, we can just know that he is there, behind it. He lies so quietly that we never can hear him breathe. ”