A city is a sore on the face of Nature; not a dangerous, ugly sore, necessarily, if one can get out of it often enough and far enough, but a sore, nevertheless, that Nature will have nothing kindly to do with. The snows that roof my sheds with Carrara, that robe my trees with ermine, that spread close and warm over my mowing, that call out the sleds and the sleigh-bells, fall into the city streets as mud, as danger on the city roofs,—as a nuisance over the city’s length and breadth, a nuisance to be hauled off and dumped into the harbor as fast as shovels and carts can move it. But you cannot dump your winter and send it off to sea. There is no cure for winter in a tip-cart; no cure in the city. There is consolation in the city, for there is plenty of company in the misery. But company really means more of the misery. If life is to be endured, if all that one can do with winter is to shovel it and suffer it, then to the city for the winter, for there one’s share of the shoveling is small, and the suffering there seems very evenly distributed. Here on the farm is neither shoveling nor suffering, no quarrel whatever with the season. Here you have nothing to do with its coming or going further than making preparation to welcome it and to bid it farewell. You slide, instead, with your boys; you do up the chores early in the short twilight, pile the logs high by the blazing chimney and—you remember that there is to be a lecture to-night by the man who has said it all in his book; there is to be a concert, a reception, a club dinner, in the city, sixteen blissful miles away,—and it is snowing! You can go if you have to. But the soft tapping on the window-panes grows faster, the voices at the corners of the house rise higher, shriller. You look down at your slippers, poke up the fire, settle a little deeper into the big chair, and beg Eve to go on with the reading. And she reads on— Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. * * * * * And, for the winter fireside meet, Between the andirons’ straddling feet, The mug of cider simmered slow, The apples sputtered in a row, And, close at hand, the basket stood With nuts from brown October’s wood. But you will be snow-bound in the morning and cannot get to town? Perhaps; but it happened so only twice to me in the long snowy winter of 1904. So twice we read the poem, and twice we lived the poem, and twice? yes, a thousand times, we were glad for a day at home that wasn’t Sunday, for a whole long day to pop corn with the boys.