Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most
skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's
bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we
made a summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.
It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle
of the month. When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature
was mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself,
in one of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking
of the warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its
individual furnace--heat. But towards noon there had come snow,
driven along the street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the
roofs and sidewalks with a business-like perseverance that would have
done credit to our severest January tempest. It set about its task
apparently as much in earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a
thaw for months to come. The greater, surely, was my heroism, when,
puffing out a final whiff of cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of
bachelor-rooms,--with a good fire burning in the grate, and a closet
right at hand, where there was still a bottle or two in the champagne
basket and a residuum of claret in a box,--quitted, I say, these
comfortable quarters, and plunged into the heart of the pitiless
snowstorm, in quest of a better life.
The better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough
if it looked so then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the
doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the
truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to
know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
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