The excitement that prompts "It snows!" and "Hurrah!" mighty soon peters out, and along about the latter part of February, when you go to the window and see that it is snowing again - again? Consarn the luck! - you and the poor widow with the large family and the small woodpile are absolutely at one.
You do get so sick and tired of winter. School lets out at four o'clock, and it's almost dark then. There's no time for play, for there's all that wood and kindling to get in, and Pap's awful cranky when he hops out of bed these frosty mornings to light the fire, and finds you've been skimpy with the kindling. And the pump freezes up, and you've got to shovel snow off the walks and out in the back-yard so Tilly can hang up the clothes when she comes to do the washing.
And your mother is just as particular about your neck being clean as she is in summer when the water doesn't make you feel so shivery.
And there's the bottle of goose-grease always handy, and the red flannel to pin around your throat, and your feet in the bucket of hot water before you go to bed - Aw, put 'em right in. Yes, I know it's hot. That's what going to make you well. In with 'em. Aw, child, it isn't going to scald you. Go on now. The water'll be stone-cold in a minute." Oh, I don't like winter for a cent. Kitchoo! There, I've gone and caught fresh cold.
I wish it would hurry up and come spring.
"When the days begin to lengthen, The cold begins to strengthen."Now, you know that doesn't stand to reason. Every day the sun inches a little higher in the heavens. His rays strike us more directly and for a longer time each day. But it's the cantankerous fact, and it simply has to stand to reason. That's the answer, and the sum has to be figured out somehow in accordance with it. Like one time, when I was about sixteen years old, and in the possession of positive and definite information about the way the earth went around the sun and all, I was arguing with one of these old codgers that think they know it all, one of these men that think it is so smart to tell you: "Sonny, when you get older, you'll know more 'n you do now - I hope. "Well, he was trying to tell me that the day lengthened at one end before it did at the other. I did my best to dispel the foolish notion from his mind, and explained to him how it simply could not be, but no, sir! he stood me down. Finally, since pure reasoning was wasted on him, I took the almanac off the nail it hung by, and - I bedog my riggin's if the old skidama link wasn't right after all. Sundown keeps coming a minute later every day, while, for quite a while there, sun-up sticks at the same old time, 7:3o A.M. Did you ever hear of anything so foolish?
"Very early, while it is yet dark," the alarm clock of old Dame Nature begins to buzz. It may snow and blow, and winter may seem to have settled in in earnest, but deep down in the earth, the root-tips, where lie the brains of vegetables, are gaping and stretching, and ho-humming, and wishing they could snooze a little longer. When it thaws in the afternoon and freezes up at sunset as tight as bricks, they tell me that out in the sugar-camp there are great doings. I don't know about it myself, but I have heard tell of boring a hole in the maple-tree, and sticking in a spout, and setting a bucket to catch the, drip, and collecting the sap, and boiling down, and sugaring off. I have heard tell of taffy-pullings, and how Joe Hendricks stuck a whole gob of maple-wax in Sally Miller's hair, and how she got even with him by rubbing his face with soot. It is only hearsay with me, but I'll tell you what Ihave done: I have eaten real maple sugar, and nearly pulled out every tooth I had in my head with maple-wax, and I have even gone so far as to have maple syrup on pancakes. It's good, too. The maple syrup came on the table in a sort of a glass flagon with a metal lid to it, and it was considered the height of bad manners to lick off the last drop of syrup that hung on the nose of the flagon.
And yet it must not be allowed to drip on the table-cloth. It is a pity we can't get any more maple syrup nowadays, but I don't feel so bad about the loss of it, as I do to think what awful liars people can be, declaring on the label that 'deed and double, 'pon their word and honor, it is pure, genuine, unadulterated maple syrup, when they know just as well as they know anything that it is only store-sugar boiled up with maple chips.
Along about the same time, the boys come home with a ring of mud around their mouths, and exhaling spicy breaths like those which blow o'er Ceylon's isle in the hymn-book. They bear a bundle of roots, whose thick, pink hide mother whittles off with the butcher-knife and sets to steep. Put away the store tea and coffee.
To-night as we drink the reddish aromatic brew we return, not only to our own young days, but to the young days of the nation when our folks moved to the West in a covered wagon; when grandpap, only a little boy then, about as big as Charley there, got down the rifle and killed the bear that had climbed into the hog-pen; when they found old Cherry out in the timber with her calf between her legs, and two wolves lying where she had horned them to death - we return to-night to the high, heroic days of old, when our forefathers conquered the wilderness and our foremothers reared the families that peopled it. This cup of sassafras to-night in their loving memory! Earth, rest easy on their moldering bones!
Some there be that still take stock in the groundhog. I don't believe he knows anything about it. And I believe that any animal that had the sense that he is reputed to have would not have remained a mere ground-hog all these years. At least not in this country. Anyhow, it's a long ways ahead, six weeks is, especially at the time when you do wish so fervently that it would come spring.
We keep on shoveling coal in the furnace, and carrying out ashes, and longing and crying: "Oh, for pity's sakes! When is this going to stop?" And then, one morning, we awaken with a start Wha - what?
