The Great Conspiracy, Complete
9781465571748
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
TO ONE WHOSE CLOSE COMPANIONSHIP HAS WROUGHT THAT HARMONY AND PEACE OF MIND FROM WHICH THIS BOOK HAS SPRUNG, AND TO WHOM ITS EVERY PAGE RECALLS A REMINISCENCE OF THE PAST IDENTIFIED WITH MEMORIES OF MY OWN This Memoir is Lovingly Inscribed OUR SOUVENIR AS far as the eye can reach, the snow lies in a deep mantle over the cheerless landscape. I look out upon a dreary moor, where the horizon melts into the cold gray of a heavy sky. The restless wind sweeps with pitiless blast through shivering trees and over bleak hills, from whose crests, like a great white veil, the clouds of hoary flakes are lifted and drawn along by the gale. Down the upland slope, across the undulating field, the blinding drift, like a thing of life, speeds in its wild caprice, now swirling in fantastic eddies around some isolated stack, half hidden in its chill embrace, now winding away over bare-blown wall and scraggy fence, and through the sighing willows near the frozen stream; now with a wild whirl it flies aloft, and the dark pines and hemlocks on the mountain-side fade away in its icy mist. Again, yonder it appears trailing along the meadow, until, flying like some fugitive spirit chased from earth by the howling wind, it vanishes in the sky. On every side these winged phantoms lead their flying chase across the dreary landscape, and fence and barn and house upon the hill in turn are dimmed or lost to sight. Who has not watched the strange antics of the drifting snow whirling past the window on a blustering winter’s day? But this is not a winter’s day. This is the advent of a New England spring. Fortunate are we that its promises are not fulfilled, for the ides of March might as oft betoken the approach of a tempestuous winter as of a balmy spring. Consecrated to Mars and Tantalus, it is a month of contradictions and disappointments, of broken promises and incessant warfare. It is the struggle of tender awakening life against the buffetings of rude and blighting elements. No man can tell what a day may bring forth. Now we look out verily upon bleak December; to-morrow—who knows?—we may be transported into May, and, with aspirations high, feel our ardor cooled by a blast of ice and a blinding fall of snow. But this cannot always last, for soon the southern breezes come and hold their sway for days, and the north wind, angry in its defeat, is driven back in lowering clouds to the region of eternal ice and snow. Then comes a lovely day, without even a cloud—all blue above, all dazzling white below. The sun shines with a glowing warmth, and we say unto ourselves, “This is, indeed, a harbinger of spring.” The sugar-maples throb and trickle with the flowing sap, and the lumbering ox-team and sled wind through the woods from tree to tree to relieve the overflowing buckets. The boiling caldron in the sugar-house near by receives the continual supply, and gives forth that sweet-scented steam that issues from the open door, and comes to us in occasional welcome whiffs across the snow. Long “wedges” of wild-geese are seen cleaving the sky in their northward flight. The little pussies on the willows are coaxed from their winter nest, and creep out upon the stem. The solitary bluebird makes his appearance, flitting along the thickets and stone walls with little hesitating warble, as if it were not yet the appointed time to sing; and down among the bogs, that cautious little pioneer, the swamp-cabbage flower, peers above the ground beneath his purple-spotted hood. He knows the fickle month which gives him birth, and keeps well under cover
