Thankful Blossom | Page 3

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THANKFUL BLOSSOM
by BRET HARTE

I
The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New
Jersey.
It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the mud
of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring on the
Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts left by
baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay stark
and cold in the waning light of an April day. There were icicles on the
fences, a rime of silver on the windward bark of maples, and occasional
bare spots on the rocky protuberances of the road, as if Nature had
worn herself out at the knees and elbows through long waiting for the
tardy spring. A few leaves disinterred by the thaw became crisp again,
and rustled in the wind, making the summer a thing so remote that all
human hope and conjecture fled before them.
Here and there the wayside fences and walls were broken down or
dismantled; and beyond them fields of snow downtrodden and

discolored, and strewn with fragments of leather, camp equipage,
harness, and cast-off clothing, showed traces of the recent encampment
and congregation of men. On some there were still standing the ruins of
rudely constructed cabins, or the semblance of fortification equally
rude and incomplete. A fox stealing along a half-filled ditch, a wolf
slinking behind an earthwork, typified the human abandonment and
desolation.
One by one the faint sunset tints faded from the sky; the far-off crests
of the Orange hills grew darker; the nearer files of pines on the
Whatnong Mountain became a mere black background; and, with the
coming-on of night, came too an icy silence that seemed to stiffen and
arrest the very wind itself. The crisp leaves no longer rustled; the
waving whips of alder and willow snapped no longer; the icicles no
longer dropped a cold fruitage from barren branch and spray; and the
roadside trees relapsed into stony quiet, so that the sound of horse's
hoofs breaking through the thin, dull, lustreless films of ice that
patched the furrowed road, might have been heard by the nearest
Continental picket a mile away.
Either a knowledge of this, or the difficulties of the road, evidently
irritated the viewless horseman. Long before he became visible, his
voice was heard in half-suppressed objurgation of the road, of his beast,
of the country folk, and the country generally. "Steady, you jade!"
"Jump, you devil, jump!" "Curse the road, and the beggarly farmers
that durst not mend it!" And then the moving bulk of horse and rider
suddenly arose above the hill, floundered and splashed, and then as
suddenly disappeared, and the rattling hoof-beats ceased.
The stranger had turned into a deserted lane still cushioned with
untrodden snow. A stone wall on one hand--in better keeping and
condition than the boundary monuments of the outlying fields--
bespoke protection and exclusiveness. Half-way up the lane the rider
checked his speed, and, dismounting, tied his horse to a wayside
sapling. This done, he went cautiously forward toward the end of the
lane, and a farm-house from whose gable window a light twinkled
through the deepening night. Suddenly he stopped, hesitated, and

uttered an impatient ejaculation. The light had disappeared. He turned
sharply on his heel, and retraced his steps until opposite a farm-shed
that stood a few paces from the wall. Hard by, a large elm cast the
gaunt shadow of its leafless limbs on the wall and surrounding snow.
The stranger stepped into this shadow, and at once seemed to become a
part of its trembling intricacies.
At the present moment it was certainly a bleak place for a tryst. There
was snow yet clinging to the trunk of the tree, and a film of ice on its
bark; the adjacent wall was slippery with frost, and fringed with icicles.
Yet in all there was a ludicrous suggestion of some sentiment past and
unseasonable: several dislodged stones of the wall were so disposed as
to form a bench and seats, and under the elm-tree's film of ice could
still be seen carved on its bark the effigy of a heart, divers initials, and