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+Project Gutenberg's How Spring Came in New England, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: How Spring Came in New England
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: August 20, 2016 [EBook #3131]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW SPRING CAME IN NEW ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+HOW SPRING CAME IN NEW ENGLAND
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+New England is the battle-ground of the seasons. It is La Vendee. To
+conquer it is only to begin the fight. When it is completely subdued,
+what kind of weather have you? None whatever.
+
+What is this New England? A country? No: a camp. It is alternately
+invaded by the hyperborean legions and by the wilting sirens of the
+tropics. Icicles hang always on its northern heights; its seacoasts
+are fringed with mosquitoes. There is for a third of the year a contest
+between the icy air of the pole and the warm wind of the gulf. The
+result of this is a compromise: the compromise is called Thaw. It is the
+normal condition in New England. The New-Englander is a person who is
+always just about to be warm and comfortable. This is the stuff of which
+heroes and martyrs are made. A person thoroughly heated or frozen is
+good for nothing. Look at the Bongos. Examine (on the map) the Dog-Rib
+nation. The New-Englander, by incessant activity, hopes to get warm.
+Edwards made his theology. Thank God, New England is not in Paris!
+
+Hudson's Bay, Labrador, Grinnell's Land, a whole zone of ice and
+walruses, make it unpleasant for New England. This icy cover, like the
+lid of a pot, is always suspended over it: when it shuts down, that is
+winter. This would be intolerable, were it not for the Gulf Stream. The
+Gulf Stream is a benign, liquid force, flowing from under the ribs of
+the equator,--a white knight of the South going up to battle the giant
+of the North. The two meet in New England, and have it out there.
+
+This is the theory; but, in fact, the Gulf Stream is mostly a delusion
+as to New England. For Ireland it is quite another thing. Potatoes ripen
+in Ireland before they are planted in New England. That is the reason
+the Irish emigrate--they desire two crops the same year. The Gulf Stream
+gets shunted off from New England by the formation of the coast below:
+besides, it is too shallow to be of any service. Icebergs float down
+against its surface-current, and fill all the New-England air with
+the chill of death till June: after that the fogs drift down from
+Newfoundland. There never was such a mockery as this Gulf Stream. It is
+like the English influence on France, on Europe. Pitt was an iceberg.
+
+Still New England survives. To what purpose? I say, as an example:
+the politician says, to produce “Poor Boys.” Bah! The poor boy is an
+anachronism in civilization. He is no longer poor, and he is not a boy.
+In Tartary they would hang him for sucking all the asses' milk that
+belongs to the children: in New England he has all the cream from the
+Public Cow. What can you expect in a country where one knows not today
+what the weather will be tomorrow? Climate makes the man. Suppose he,
+too, dwells on the Channel Islands, where he has all climates, and is
+superior to all. Perhaps he will become the prophet, the seer, of his
+age, as he is its Poet. The New-Englander is the man without a climate.
+Why is his country recognized? You won't find it on any map of Paris.
+
+And yet Paris is the universe. Strange anomaly! The greater must include
+the less; but how if the less leaks out? This sometimes happens.
+
+And yet there are phenomena in that country worth observing. One of them
+is the conduct of Nature from the 1st of March to the 1st of June,
+or, as some say, from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice. As
+Tourmalain remarked, “You'd better observe the unpleasant than to be
+blind.” This was in 802. Tourmalain is dead; so is Gross Alain; so is
+little Pee-Wee: we shall all be dead before things get any better.
+
+That is the law. Without revolution there is nothing. What is
+revolution? It is turning society over, and putting the best underground
+for a fertilizer. Thus only will things grow. What has this to do
+with New England? In the language of that flash of social lightning,
+Beranger, “May the Devil fly away with me if I can see!”
+
+Let us speak of the period in the year in New England when winter
+appears to hesitate. Except in the calendar, the action is ironical;
+but it is still deceptive. The sun mounts high: it is above the horizon
+twelve hours at a time. The snow gradually sneaks away in liquid
+repentance. One morning it is gone, except in shaded spots and close by
+the fences. From about the trunks of the trees it has long departed:
+the tree is a living thing, and its growth repels it. The fence is dead,
+driven into the earth in a rigid line by man: the fence, in short, is
+dogma: icy prejudice lingers near it. The snow has disappeared; but the
+landscape is a ghastly sight,--bleached, dead. The trees are stakes; the
+grass is of no color; and the bare soil is not brown with a healthful
+brown; life has gone out of it. Take up a piece of turf: it is a clod,
+without warmth, inanimate. Pull it in pieces: there is no hope in it:
+it is a part of the past; it is the refuse of last year. This is the
+condition to which winter has reduced the landscape. When the snow,
+which was a pall, is removed, you see how ghastly it is. The face of the
+country is sodden. It needs now only the south wind to sweep over it,
+full of the damp breath of death; and that begins to blow. No prospect
+would be more dreary.
+
+And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy. He opens the
+window. He goes out, and catches cold. He is stirred by the mysterious
+coming of something. If there is sign of change nowhere else, we detect
+it in the newspaper. In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument
+for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to
+grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The
+poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms
+in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is
+greater than man: he is nature on two legs,--ambulatory.
+
+At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison seems
+to have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are entering without
+opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies warm upon the southern
+bank, and water oozes from its base. If you examine the buds of the
+lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot say that they are swelling;
+but the varnish with which they were coated in the fall to keep out
+the frost seems to be cracking. If the sugar-maple is hacked, it will
+bleed,--the pure white blood of Nature.
+
+At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect: its
+color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar
+on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws out; a
+company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window. It
+is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of
+millers, born out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather for
+the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a
+mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle-brattle chorus on the
+edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, “Did you hear the
+frogs last night?” That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his
+childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves. It fills one with
+sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is
+a strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and
+warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his
+better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring
+multiply. The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant
+leaning on the area-gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the
+other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but
+true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to
+protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, “How sweet it is to
+be with those we love to be with!”
+
+All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early
+buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, “Twenty feet of snow at
+Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow
+still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron.”
+
+Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season?
+Before noon it rains, by three o'clock it hails; before night the
+bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging,
+whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is drifted in
+banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the seventeenth century,
+Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass. Before that, men had
+suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering. A century
+later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and
+Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds a new because distinct
+terror to the weather. Science names and registers the ills of life; and
+yet it is a gain to know the names and habits of our enemies. It is with
+some satisfaction in our knowledge that we say the thermometer marks
+zero.
+
+In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken
+possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has
+retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it
+is better to have it now than later. We have a conceit of understanding
+things.
+
+The sun is in alliance with the earth. Between the two the snow is
+uncomfortable. Compelled to go, it decides to go suddenly. The first day
+there is slush with rain; the second day, mud with hail; the third day
+a flood with sunshine. The thermometer declares that the temperature is
+delightful. Man shivers and sneezes. His neighbor dies of some disease
+newly named by science; but he dies all the same as if it hadn't been
+newly named. Science has not discovered any name that is not fatal.
+
+This is called the breaking-up of winter.
+
+Nature seems for some days to be in doubt, not exactly able to stand
+still, not daring to put forth anything tender. Man says that the worst
+is over. If he should live a thousand years, he would be deceived every
+year. And this is called an age of skepticism. Man never believed in so
+many things as now: he never believed so much in himself. As to Nature,
+he knows her secrets: he can predict what she will do. He communicates
+with the next world by means of an alphabet which he has invented.
+He talks with souls at the other end of the spirit-wire. To be sure,
+neither of them says anything; but they talk. Is not that something? He
+suspends the law of gravitation as to his own body--he has learned how
+to evade it--as tyrants suspend the legal writs of habeas corpus. When
+Gravitation asks for his body, she cannot have it. He says of himself,
+“I am infallible; I am sublime.” He believes all these things. He is
+master of the elements. Shakespeare sends him a poem just made, and as
+good a poem as the man could write himself. And yet this man--he goes
+out of doors without his overcoat, catches cold, and is buried in three
+days. “On the 21st of January,” exclaimed Mercier, “all kings felt for
+the backs of their necks.” This might be said of all men in New England
+in the spring. This is the season that all the poets celebrate. Let us
+suppose that once, in Thessaly, there was a genial spring, and there was
+a poet who sang of it. All later poets have sung the same song. “Voila
+tout!” That is the root of poetry.
+
+Another delusion. We hear toward evening, high in air, the “conk” of
+the wild-geese. Looking up, you see the black specks of that adventurous
+triangle, winging along in rapid flight northward. Perhaps it takes a
+wide returning sweep, in doubt; but it disappears in the north. There
+is no mistaking that sign. This unmusical “conk” is sweeter than the
+“kerchunk” of the bull-frog. Probably these birds are not idiots, and
+probably they turned back south again after spying out the nakedness of
+the land; but they have made their sign. Next day there is a rumor that
+somebody has seen a bluebird. This rumor, unhappily for the bird (which
+will freeze to death), is confirmed. In less than three days everybody
+has seen a bluebird; and favored people have heard a robin or rather the
+yellow-breasted thrush, misnamed a robin in America. This is no doubt
+true: for angle-worms have been seen on the surface of the ground; and,
+wherever there is anything to eat, the robin is promptly on hand. About
+this time you notice, in protected, sunny spots, that the grass has a
+little color. But you say that it is the grass of last fall. It is very
+difficult to tell when the grass of last fall became the grass of this
+spring. It looks “warmed over.” The green is rusty. The lilac-buds have
+certainly swollen a little, and so have those of the soft maple. In the
+rain the grass does not brighten as you think it ought to, and it is
+only when the rain turns to snow that you see any decided green color
+by contrast with the white. The snow gradually covers everything very
+quietly, however. Winter comes back without the least noise or bustle,
+tireless, malicious, implacable. Neither party in the fight now makes
+much fuss over it; and you might think that Nature had surrendered
+altogether, if you did not find about this time, in the Woods, on
+the edge of a snow-bank, the modest blossoms of the trailing arbutus,
+shedding their delicious perfume. The bravest are always the tenderest,
+says the poet. The season, in its blind way, is trying to express
+itself.
+
+And it is assisted. There is a cheerful chatter in the trees. The
+blackbirds have come, and in numbers, households of them, villages of
+them,--communes, rather. They do not believe in God, these black-birds.
+They think they can take care of themselves. We shall see. But they
+are well informed. They arrived just as the last snow-bank melted. One
+cannot say now that there is not greenness in the grass; not in the
+wide fields, to be sure, but on lawns and banks sloping south. The
+dark-spotted leaves of the dog-tooth violet begin to show. Even
+Fahrenheit's contrivance joins in the upward movement: the mercury has
+suddenly gone up from thirty degrees to sixty-five degrees. It is time
+for the ice-man. Ice has no sooner disappeared than we desire it.
+
+There is a smile, if one may say so, in the blue sky, and there
+is softness in the south wind. The song-sparrow is singing in the
+apple-tree. Another bird-note is heard,--two long, musical whistles,
+liquid but metallic. A brown bird this one, darker than the
+song-sparrow, and without the latter's light stripes, and smaller, yet
+bigger than the queer little chipping-bird. He wants a familiar name,
+this sweet singer, who appears to be a sort of sparrow. He is such a
+contrast to the blue-jays, who have arrived in a passion, as usual,
+screaming and scolding, the elegant, spoiled beauties! They wrangle from
+morning till night, these beautiful, high-tempered aristocrats.
+
+Encouraged by the birds, by the bursting of the lilac-buds, by the
+peeping-up of the crocuses, by tradition, by the sweet flutterings of
+a double hope, another sign appears. This is the Easter bonnets, most
+delightful flowers of the year, emblems of innocence, hope, devotion.
+Alas that they have to be worn under umbrellas, so much thought,
+freshness, feeling, tenderness have gone into them! And a northeast
+storm of rain, accompanied with hail, comes to crown all these virtues
+with that of self-sacrifice. The frail hat is offered up to the
+implacable season. In fact, Nature is not to be forestalled nor hurried
+in this way. Things cannot be pushed. Nature hesitates. The woman who
+does not hesitate in April is lost. The appearance of the bonnets is
+premature. The blackbirds see it. They assemble. For two days they hold
+a noisy convention, with high debate, in the tree-tops. Something is
+going to happen.
+
+Say, rather, the usual thing is about to occur. There is a wind called
+Auster, another called Eurus, another called Septentrio, another
+Meridies, besides Aquilo, Vulturnus, Africus. There are the eight great
+winds of the classical dictionary,--arsenal of mystery and terror and of
+the unknown,--besides the wind Euroaquilo of St. Luke. This is the wind
+that drives an apostle wishing to gain Crete upon the African Syrtis. If
+St. Luke had been tacking to get to Hyannis, this wind would have forced
+him into Holmes's Hole. The Euroaquilo is no respecter of persons.
+
+These winds, and others unnamed and more terrible, circle about New
+England. They form a ring about it: they lie in wait on its borders,
+but only to spring upon it and harry it. They follow each other in
+contracting circles, in whirlwinds, in maelstroms of the atmosphere:
+they meet and cross each other, all at a moment. This New England is set
+apart: it is the exercise-ground of the weather. Storms bred elsewhere
+come here full-grown: they come in couples, in quartets, in choruses.
+If New England were not mostly rock, these winds would carry it off; but
+they would bring it all back again, as happens with the sandy portions.
+What sharp Eurus carries to Jersey, Africus brings back. When the air
+is not full of snow, it is full of dust. This is called one of the
+compensations of Nature.
+
+This is what happened after the convention of the blackbirds: A moaning
+south wind brought rain; a southwest wind turned the rain to snow; what
+is called a zephyr, out of the west, drifted the snow; a north wind
+sent the mercury far below freezing. Salt added to snow increases the
+evaporation and the cold. This was the office of the northeast wind: it
+made the snow damp, and increased its bulk; but then it rained a little,
+and froze, thawing at the same time. The air was full of fog and
+snow and rain. And then the wind changed, went back round the circle,
+reversing everything, like dragging a cat by its tail. The mercury
+approached zero. This was nothing uncommon. We know all these winds. We
+are familiar with the different “forms of water.”
+
+All this was only the prologue, the overture. If one might be permitted
+to speak scientifically, it was only the tuning of the instruments. The
+opera was to come,--the Flying Dutchman of the air.
+
+There is a wind called Euroclydon: it would be one of the Eumenides;
+only they are women. It is half-brother to the gigantic storm-wind of
+the equinox. The Euroclydon is not a wind: it is a monster. Its breath
+is frost. It has snow in its hair. It is something terrible. It peddles
+rheumatism, and plants consumption.
+
+The Euroclydon knew just the moment to strike into the discord of the
+weather in New England. From its lair about Point Desolation, from the
+glaciers of the Greenland continent, sweeping round the coast, leaving
+wrecks in its track, it marched right athwart the other conflicting
+winds, churning them into a fury, and inaugurating chaos. It was the
+Marat of the elements. It was the revolution marching into the “dreaded
+wood of La Sandraie.”
+
+Let us sum it all up in one word: it was something for which there is no
+name.
+
+Its track was destruction. On the sea it leaves wrecks. What does it
+leave on land? Funerals. When it subsides, New England is prostrate. It
+has left its legacy: this legacy is coughs and patent medicines. This
+is an epic; this is destiny. You think Providence is expelled out of New
+England? Listen!
+
+Two days after Euroclydon, I found in the woods the hepatica--earliest
+of wildwood flowers, evidently not intimidated by the wild work of the
+armies trampling over New England--daring to hold up its tender blossom.
+One could not but admire the quiet pertinacity of Nature. She had been
+painting the grass under the snow. In spots it was vivid green. There
+was a mild rain,--mild, but chilly. The clouds gathered, and broke away
+in light, fleecy masses. There was a softness on the hills. The birds
+suddenly were on every tree, glancing through the air, filling it with
+song, sometimes shaking raindrops from their wings. The cat brings in
+one in his mouth. He thinks the season has begun, and the game-laws are
+off. He is fond of Nature, this cat, as we all are: he wants to possess
+it. At four o'clock in the morning there is a grand dress-rehearsal of
+the birds. Not all the pieces of the orchestra have arrived; but there
+are enough. The grass-sparrow has come. This is certainly charming. The
+gardener comes to talk about seeds: he uncovers the straw-berries and
+the grape-vines, salts the asparagus-bed, and plants the peas. You ask
+if he planted them with a shot-gun. In the shade there is still frost in
+the ground. Nature, in fact, still hesitates; puts forth one hepatica at
+a time, and waits to see the result; pushes up the grass slowly, perhaps
+draws it in at night.
+
+This indecision we call Spring.
+
+It becomes painful. It is like being on the rack for ninety days,
+expecting every day a reprieve. Men grow hardened to it, however.
+
+This is the order with man,--hope, surprise, bewilderment, disgust,
+facetiousness. The people in New England finally become facetious about
+spring. This is the last stage: it is the most dangerous. When a man
+has come to make a jest of misfortune, he is lost. “It bores me to die,”
+ said the journalist Carra to the headsman at the foot of the guillotine:
+“I would like to have seen the continuation.” One is also interested to
+see how spring is going to turn out.
+
+A day of sun, of delusive bird-singing, sight of the mellow earth,--all
+these begin to beget confidence. The night, even, has been warm. But
+what is this in the morning journal, at breakfast?--“An area of low
+pressure is moving from the Tortugas north.” You shudder.
+
+What is this Low Pressure itself,--it? It is something frightful, low,
+crouching, creeping, advancing; it is a foreboding; it is misfortune by
+telegraph; it is the “'93” of the atmosphere.
+
+This low pressure is a creation of Old Prob. What is that? Old Prob. is
+the new deity of the Americans, greater than AEolus, more despotic than
+Sans-Culotte. The wind is his servitor, the lightning his messenger. He
+is a mystery made of six parts electricity, and one part “guess.” This
+deity is worshiped by the Americans; his name is on every man's lips
+first in the morning; he is the Frankenstein of modern science. Housed
+at Washington, his business is to direct the storms of the whole country
+upon New England, and to give notice in advance. This he does. Sometimes
+he sends the storm, and then gives notice. This is mere playfulness on
+his part: it is all one to him. His great power is in the low pressure.
+
+On the Bexar plains of Texas, among the hills of the Presidio, along the
+Rio Grande, low pressure is bred; it is nursed also in the Atchafalaya
+swamps of Louisiana; it moves by the way of Thibodeaux and Bonnet Carre.
+The southwest is a magazine of atmospheric disasters. Low pressure may
+be no worse than the others: it is better known, and is most used to
+inspire terror. It can be summoned any time also from the everglades of
+Florida, from the morasses of the Okeechobee.
+
+When the New-Englander sees this in his news paper, he knows what it
+means. He has twenty-four hours' warning; but what can he do? Nothing
+but watch its certain advance by telegraph. He suffers in anticipation.
+That is what Old Prob. has brought about, suffering by anticipation.
+This low pressure advances against the wind. The wind is from the
+northeast. Nothing could be more unpleasant than a northeast wind? Wait
+till low pressure joins it. Together they make spring in New England.
+A northeast storm from the southwest!--there is no bitterer satire than
+this. It lasts three days. After that the weather changes into something
+winter-like.
+
+A solitary song-sparrow, without a note of joy, hops along the snow to
+the dining-room window, and, turning his little head aside, looks up. He
+is hungry and cold. Little Minnette, clasping her hands behind her
+back, stands and looks at him, and says, “Po' birdie!” They appear to
+understand each other. The sparrow gets his crumb; but he knows too much
+to let Minnette get hold of him. Neither of these little things could
+take care of itself in a New-England spring not in the depths of it.
+This is what the father of Minnette, looking out of the window upon
+the wide waste of snow, and the evergreens bent to the ground with the
+weight of it, says, “It looks like the depths of spring.” To this has
+man come: to his facetiousness has succeeded sarcasm. It is the first of
+May.
+
+Then follows a day of bright sun and blue sky. The birds open the
+morning with a lively chorus. In spite of Auster, Euroclydon, low
+pressure, and the government bureau, things have gone forward. By the
+roadside, where the snow has just melted, the grass is of the color of
+emerald. The heart leaps to see it. On the lawn there are twenty robins,
+lively, noisy, worm-seeking. Their yellow breasts contrast with the
+tender green of the newly-springing clover and herd's-grass. If they
+would only stand still, we might think the dandelions had blossomed. On
+an evergreen-bough, looking at them, sits a graceful bird, whose back is
+bluer than the sky. There is a red tint on the tips of the boughs of
+the hard maple. With Nature, color is life. See, already, green, yellow,
+blue, red! In a few days--is it not so?--through the green masses of the
+trees will flash the orange of the oriole, the scarlet of the tanager;
+perhaps tomorrow.
+
+But, in fact, the next day opens a little sourly. It is almost clear
+overhead: but the clouds thicken on the horizon; they look leaden; they
+threaten rain. It certainly will rain: the air feels like rain, or
+snow. By noon it begins to snow, and you hear the desolate cry of the
+phoebe-bird. It is a fine snow, gentle at first; but it soon drives in
+swerving lines, for the wind is from the southwest, from the west,
+from the northeast, from the zenith (one of the ordinary winds of New
+England), from all points of the compass. The fine snow becomes rain;
+it becomes large snow; it melts as it falls; it freezes as it falls. At
+last a storm sets in, and night shuts down upon the bleak scene.
+
+During the night there is a change. It thunders and lightens. Toward
+morning there is a brilliant display of aurora borealis. This is a sign
+of colder weather.
+
+The gardener is in despair; so is the sportsman. The trout take no
+pleasure in biting in such weather.
+
+Paragraphs appear in the newspapers, copied from the paper of last year,
+saying that this is the most severe spring in thirty years. Every one,
+in fact, believes that it is, and also that next year the spring will be
+early. Man is the most gullible of creatures.
+
+And with reason: he trusts his eyes, and not his instinct. During
+this most sour weather of the year, the anemone blossoms; and, almost
+immediately after, the fairy pencil, the spring beauty, the dog-tooth
+violet, and the true violet. In clouds and fog, and rain and snow, and
+all discouragement, Nature pushes on her forces with progressive haste
+and rapidity. Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows are deeply
+green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a burst of sunshine
+the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink, the hawthorns give a
+sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the world, of color.
+
+In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with
+the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees. The next day the
+mercury stands at eighty degrees. Summer has come.
+
+There was no Spring.
+
+The winter is over. You think so? Robespierre thought the Revolution
+was over in the beginning of his last Thermidor. He lost his head after
+that.
+
+When the first buds are set, and the corn is up, and the cucumbers have
+four leaves, a malicious frost steals down from the north and kills them
+in a night.
+
+That is the last effort of spring. The mercury then mounts to ninety
+degrees. The season has been long, but, on the whole, successful. Many
+people survive it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of How Spring Came in New England
+by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW SPRING CAME IN NEW ENGLAND ***
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