enough to see the sun go down, the eastern sky shows the palest blue, and the western the palest green of the year. The evening star comes out almost the moment the sun has disappeared; and its mild lustre is as beautiful as on a summer night. When the bat flits before our faces, the boys again observe that we are having no winter, and that they do not believe they shall have their skates on once during the whole holidays.
This weather, with its south-west wind, is pleasant in its way; but it is not the seasonable January that we like best; and we are obliged to remember that the cold weather will come after the boys are gone back to school; or, if it does not come at all, it will be a bad thing for the year and its crops. The soil will miss the frost, and there will be a world of trouble with vermin.
We relish sunshine, to begin with, on a proper January day; but we like it to light up a very different scene. There should be a thick natural blind of white frostwork on the window-panes,—so thick that Harry has to breathe himself out of breath before he can make a space large enough to see out of; and then, the spikes of ice close it in again in a few minutes. His sisters look anxiously to their flower-stands behind the drawing-room curtains, lest the hyacinths and primulas should have suffered from being near the window. If it is as cold to-night, they will put the curtains between the flower-stands and the windows. We see the gardener visiting his cabbage-beds, as soon as it is light, to see how his vegetables get on without any covering of snow. He did hope, as he told me last week, that the snow would come before the frost; but it has not. He makes up his notion of the benefits of snow from the two applications of the word starve. People are starved with hunger and also with cold; and, as snow protects plants from cold, he supposes it protects them from hunger, and insists that snow is the most “nourishing” thing for them that can be. He is therefore only half satisfied with our doings when we cover rows of vegetables with spruce boughs or straw. It is better than nothing, he admits; but it does not “nourish” like snow.
The boys were out before it was light, throwing down the first hot water of the day on the great slide in the yard, where there is a convenient corner for the purpose, admitting of an ample career. As they have this and sundry other opportunities among the ditches of the neighbourhood, as well as on the park mere, I expect them to help me in chipping up and cinder-strewing any slides which may appear on the causeway, or in the road, where elderly people, and children, and horsemen, and carts will be passing all day. The housemaid is busy rubbing off every speck of rust from every pair of skates in the house. In spite of the bitter north-east wind, we have to bear the breakfast-room window open for a time, that Harry may attend to his pensioners, the birds, who can get nothing out of the iron soil on such a day. He is so bent on giving them some of his own bread and milk, that we let him try; and he soon perceives that dry bread crumbs are better, as the spoonful of bread and milk is immediately frozen into a lump, which the birds cannot manage. He finds the chaffinches rather rude to the robins, and the sparrows pert as usual; but the two blackbirds are really tyrannical. He wants to send them away till the others have had their fill, if that could be done without putting the whole levée to flight. We advise him to lay out a good handful, and shut the window, leaving the creatures to settle their own affairs. Being assured that blackbirds, like other creatures, stop eating when they have had enough, he consents: but he stands watching; and we know, by the impatient tap on the pane, when the blackbirds are there again.
Fishes have their claims as well as birds, he admits; and when his brothers are going to make an air-hole in the pond, he goes with them, lending his little help to batter the ice with the iron bar which he could not lift. How the fish can live in such a cold place is past his comprehension; but, if the frost last long enough, he will see them so far alive as to come to the hole to be fed. We promise to try to show him something more wonderful. There are leeches in the pools on the moor; and if we can find a shallow pool, frozen completely through, we shall find leeches inclosed in the ice, like flies in amber: and if gradually thawed, they will exhibit a very good state of health. He is impatient to be off to the moor; but his father and brothers must have their two hours’ skating first. He is to help the gardener now, and next say his lessons; and then we will all go together for a long walk on the moor.
The gardener supposes, as regularly as such a frost comes round, that we shall soon be hearing of the market gardeners “down there” (near London) making a show of themselves,—walking in procession, with a bunch of black vegetables dangling from a pole for a banner—to beg charity. He “don’t like the idea of those frozen-out gardeners; for, if they knew their business, there is plenty for them to do, in frost as at other times.” Their ground ought to be trenched before, to benefit by the frost, and the fruit-trees dug round; and then there is the forking and breaking the surface in the noon hours, whenever the soil is soft enough; and the spreading the manure: and there is much time required in seeing that there is warmth enough everywhere in the greenhouses, and the pits and the frames; and the airing of everything at proper times;—quite enough, all these together, to fill up the short days. He is sorry for them when hailstones demolish their greenhouses and frames; but they might deal with such a thing as frost without humbling themselves to beg. It is impossible to convey to him what the scope and character of market gardening for a metropolis are, and what the peculiarities of demand for vegetables are in the midst of a London winter; and he is therefore hardly aware of his own advantages in a position where, happen what may, he cannot be frozen out of home and bread, and into debt and hunger, or the workhouse.
The skating company on the mere is much like every other skating company on every lake or large pond in the country. There are the ladies in chairs on runners, wrapped in furs, and propelled by husbands or brothers over all the smooth parts of the surface. It is wonderful how they can bear sitting still, or facing such a north-east wind.
