sidered, one of the chief characteristics of our hardy northern races.
True poets and idealists, they were lazy, and they had but few clothes,
both excellent reasons for inclining kindly to the warm weather.

And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness
of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and
things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly
state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they
would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little
section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no, not even if
the waves of that bright clime had rippled over sands of literal gold,
and their winter had been nine months in the year instead of the
customary six and a half.

"A mild winter on the Cape." Grandpa Keeler often repeated the words; and
sitting by the fire at night, his eyes grew big and wild, and his tones
took on a terrible impressiveness as he told of _rough_ winters on the
Cape, when the snow lay drifted high across the fences in the lane, and
"every time she came in yender"--pointing in the direction of the
Bay--"she licked offa slice or two o' bank, and the old Ark whirled and
shuk--O Lordy, teacher!--as ef she'd slipped her moorin's and gone off on
a high sea, and ef you'd a heered the wind a screechin' inter them
winders, you'd a thought the"----

"Bijonah Keeler!" Grandma Keeler spoke. She said no more. It was enough.

"You'd a thought something had got loose, sure," concluded Grandpa, with
a keen glance aside to me that revealed, as with tenfold significance,
the obstructed force of his narrative.

In the daytime, Grandpa was now much out of doors. He had most frequent
and loving recourse to an interesting looking pile of rubbish at the
south end of the barn. There he sat, and napped and nodded, and employed
the brief interims of wakefulness in whittling bean poles, preparatory
for another year's supply of that dreaded and inexorable crop. Earth's
disturbing voices, Grandma Keeler herself, seldom reached him there.

Early, too, I saw him in the garden, leaning pensively on his hoe--a
becalmed and striking figure in a ragged snuff-colored coat, and a hat
marked by numerous small orifices, through which, here and there, strands
from his silvery fringe of hair strayed and waved in the breezes.

It was Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's custom at the first approach of
spring to detach them