With the wind howling from the northwest, and the mercury crouching below the zero mark, it seems a good time to sit in the house and think of winter as it used to be. What is the advantage of growing old, if one cannot find an hour now and then for the pleasures of memory?
The year's end is for the young. Such is the order of the world, the universal paradox. Opposite seeks opposite. And we were young once,—a good while ago,—and for us, also, winter was a bright and busy season, its days all too short and too few. I speak of "weekdays," be it understood. As for winter Sundays, in an unwarmed meeting-house (though the sermon might be like the breath of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace), we should have been paragons of early piety, beings too good to live, if we had wished the hours longer. Let their miseries be forgotten.
