Some Winter Days in Iowa | Page 6

fossils in the grim, gray rocks;
when the music of bee and bird and breeze shall have waned into
everlasting silence; when "all the pomp of yesterday is one with
Nineveh and Tyre;" when man with all his achievements and triumphs,
his love and laughter, his songs and sighs, is forgotten even more
completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of
the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become
evolutionized into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality
unto which the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall
this subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so
many varied forms, be wholly lost, or shall it pass joyfully through the
ether to some brighter and better world? Is it true
"That nothing walks with aimless feet; That no one life shall be
destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile
complete?"
We are scarce a step ahead of our forefathers. We do not know.
"Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At
last--far off--at last to all, And every winter change to spring."

II. FEBRUARY IN STORM AND SHINE.
February often opens with a season of cold gray days when stratus
clouds, dark and unrelenting as iron, hang across the sky and bitter
winds from the northwest blow down the Iowa valleys and over the

frost-cracked ridges. In the city the wheels crunch on the scanty snow,
and every window is made opaque by the frost. Trains are many hours
late, and dense clouds of steam from locomotive funnels condense into
vivid whiteness in the wintry air. Nuthatches, woodpeckers, and
chickadees join the English sparrows in begging crumbs and scraps
around the kitchen door. In the timber the wind rustles shiveringly
through the leaves which still cling to some of the oaks. The music of
the woods is reduced to a minimum. Life is a serious business for
everyone who has to work in order that he may eat; there is little time
or spirit for song. In the late forenoon and again in the middle of the
afternoon the rattle of bills may be heard on the branches; at other times
the woods are almost silent, save for the cracking of the earth as it
heaves under the frost, and the boom of the ever thickening ice on the
river.
* * * * *
Then the south wind steals across King Winter's borderland, and the
iron clouds begin to relax. But at first there seems little improvement.
"The south end of a north wind," say the experienced, and shiver. But
wait. Every hour the wind grows warmer and the clouds softer. They
come closer to the earth, hanging like a thick curtain across the sky. On
the prairie the diameter of the circling horizon seems scarcely three
miles long. The clouds hug the far sides of the nearest ridges and shut
you in, above and around. It must have been such a day as this when
Fitzgerald made that line of the Rubaiyat read: "And this inverted bowl
they call the sky." Today the bowl seems very small and dreary.
* * * * *
By and by a snowflake falls, then a few others, soft as the spray of the
thistle in the early days of October. Gently as the fairy balloons of the
dandelion they float through the air and rest upon the withered leaves
of the white oaks. Soon they come faster, and now the forest-crowned
ridge half a mile away which was in plain sight a minute ago is
screened from view by the fast falling white curtain.
"He giveth snow like wool." Very beautiful is this snow as it softens

the rugged, corky limbs of the mossy cup oaks. It is not like the hard,
granular snow which stung your face like sand when you were out in
the storm a month ago, when the trumpets of the sky were doing a
fanfare, the wind raged from the northwest, the top of a tall black
cherry snapped like a shipmast and crashed through the forest rigging
to the white deck below, while the gnarled limbs of the big elms looked
like the muscles of giants wrestling with the storm king. This storm
to-day is not "announced by all the trumpets of the sky." It comes softly
as the breath of morning on a May meadow. It silences every sound and
curtains you into a rare studio where you may admire its own
exceeding beauty. There have not been so many beautiful snow crystals
in any storm of the winter. You may see half a dozen different varieties
on your coat sleeve with the naked eye, and you pull out a strong lens
the