HONEY AND MYRRH
The neighborhood, the township, and the world had been snowed in. Snow
drifted the road in hills and hollows, and hung in little eddying
wreaths, where the wind took it, on the pasture slopes. It made solid
banks in the dooryards, and buried the stone walls out of sight. The
lacework of its fantasy became daintily apparent in the conceits with
which it broidered over all the common objects familiar in homely
lives. The pump, in yards where that had supplanted the old-fashioned
curb, wore a heavy mob-cap. The vane on the barn was delicately sifted
over, and the top of every picket in the high front-yard fence had a
fluffy peak. But it was chiefly in the woods that the rapture and
flavor of the time ran riot in making beauty. There every fir branch
swayed under a tuft of white, and the brown refuse of the year was all
hidden away.
That morning, no one in Tiverton Hollow had gone out of the house, save
to shovel paths, and do the necessary chores. The road lay untouched
until ten o'clock, when a selectman gave notice that it was an occasion
for "breakin' out," by starting with his team, and gathering oxen by
the way until a conquering procession ground through the drifts, the
men shoveling at intervals where the snow lay deepest, the oxen walking
swayingly, head to the earth, and the faint wreath of their breath
ascending and cooling on the air.
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