The editor of the
_Argus_ not only spoke of "Nature's snowy mantle," but coined another
happy phrase about Little Arcady being "locked in the icy embrace of
winter." This was admitted to be accurately literal, in spite of its
poetic daring.
Miss Caroline confessed homesickness to me after the first heavy snow.
She spoke as lightly of it as she should have done, but I could see that
her own land pulled at her heart with every blast that shook her
casements. No longer, however, was there even a second-cousin whose
hospitality she was free to claim, for Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey,
C.S.A., now slept with his fathers in far-off Virginia, leaving behind
him only traditions and a little old sherry. The former Miss Caroline
had always shared with him, and a cask of the latter he bequeathed to
her with his love. And the valley being now void of her kin, she was
doubly an exile.
Such new desolation as she must have felt was masked under jesting
dispraise of our execrable Northern climate. Surely a land permitted to
congeal so utterly had forfeited the grace of its Maker.
Clem's lack of executive genius also earned a meed of my neighbor's
disparagement. He was a worthless, trifling "boy," an idling dreamer, an
irresponsible, inconsequent visionary, in whose baseless fancies it was
astounding that a woman of her years should fatuously place reliance.
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