The Cold Snap | Page 4

times
on the lips of each one of us, but beyond that, I recall little that was said.
Bill, who was the joker of the family, had essayed a jest or two at first
on our strange predicament, but they had been poorly received. The
discomfort was too serious, and the extraordinary nature of the
visitation filled every mind with nameless forebodings and a great,
unformed fear.
We asked each other if our neighbors were all in the same plight with
ourselves. They must be, of course, and many of them far less prepared
to meet it. There might be whole families in the last extremity of cold
right about us. I went to the window, and with my knife scraped away
the rime of frost, an eighth of an inch thick, which obscured it, till I
could see out. A whitish-gray light was on the landscape. Every object
seemed still, with a quite peculiar stillness that might be called intense.
From the chimneys of some of the houses around thick columns of
smoke and sparks were pouring, showing that the fires were being
crowded below. Other chimneys showed no smoke at all. Here and

there a dull light shone from a window. There was no other sign of life
anywhere. The streets were absolutely empty. No one suggested trying
to communicate with other houses. This was a plight in which human
concourse could avail nothing.
After piling all the coal on the furnace it would hold, the volume of
heat rising from the register was such as to singe the clothes of those
over it, while those waiting their turn were shivering a few feet off. The
men of course yielded the nearest places to the women, and, as we
walked briskly up and down in the room, the frost gathered on our
mustaches. The morning, we said, would bring relief, but none of us
fully believed it, for the strange experience we were enduring appeared
to imply a suspension of the ordinary course of nature.
A number of cats and dogs, driven from their accustomed haunts by the
intense cold, had gathered under the windows, and there piteously
moaned and whined for entrance.
Swiftly it grew colder. The iron casing of the register was cold in spite
of the volume of heat pouring through it. Every point or surface of
metal in the room was covered with a thick coating of frost. The frost
even settled upon a few filaments of cobweb in the corners of the room
which had escaped the housemaid's broom, and which now shone like
hidden sins in the day of judgment. The door-knob, mop-boards, and
wooden casings of the room glistened. We were so chilled that woolen
was as cold to the touch as wood or iron. There being no more any heat
in our bodies, the non-conducting quality of a substance was no
appreciable advantage. To avoid the greater cold near the floor, several
of our number got upon the tables, presenting, with their feet tucked
under them, an aspect that would have been sufficiently laughable
under other circumstances. But, as a rule, fun does not survive the
freezing point. Every few moments the beams of the house snapped
like the timbers of a straining ship, and at intervals the frozen ground
cracked with a noise like cannon,--the hyperborean earthquake.
A ruddy light shone against the windows. Bill went and rubbed away
the ice. A neighbor's house was burning. It was one of those whose
chimneys were vomiting forth sparks when I had looked out before.

There was promise of an extensive conflagration. Nobody appeared in
the streets, and, as there were intervening houses, we could not see
what became of the inmates. The very slight interest which this
threatening conflagration aroused in our minds was doubtless a mark of
the already stupefying effect of the cold. Even our voices had become
weak and altered.
The cold is a sad enemy to beauty. My poor wife and Ella, with their
pinched faces, strained, aching expression, red, rheumy eyes and noses,
and blue or pallid cheeks were sad parodies on their comely selves.
Other forces of nature have in them something the spirit of man can
sympathize with, as the wind, the waves, the sun; but there is
something terribly inhuman about the cold. I can imagine it as a
congenial principle brooding over the face of chaos in the aeons before
light was.
Hours had passed, it might have been years, when father said, "Let us
pray." He knelt down, and we all mechanically followed his example,
as from childhood up we had done at morning and evening. Ever before,
the act had seemed merely a fit and graceful ceremony, from which no
one had expected anything in particular to follow, or had experienced