Year after year the days grow fewer that will let a cutter slip up
beyond the farthest of the "road-houses" and cross the line into
Westchester. People say that the climate is changing; but close
observers recognize a sympathy between the decrease of snow-storms and
the increase of refinement--that is, a sympathy in inverse ratio; a
balanced progress in opposite directions. As we grow further and further
beyond even old-world standards of polite convention, as we formalize
and super-formalize our codes, and steadily eliminate every element of
amusement from our amusements, Nature in strict conformity represses her
joyous exuberance. The snow-storm of the past is gone, because the great
public sleigh that held twenty-odd merry-makers in a shell like a circus
band-wagon has gone out of fashion among all classes. Now we have,
during severe winters, just enough snow from time to time to bear the
light sleigh of the young man who, being in good society, is also horsy.
When _he_ finds the road vulgar, the poor plebeian souls who go
sleighing for the sport of it may sell their red and blue vehicles, for
Nature, the sycophant of fashion, will snow no more.

But they had "good old-fashioned" snow-storms eighty years after the
Declaration of Independence, and one had fallen upon New York that
tempted Mrs. Jacob Dolph to leave her baby, ten months old, in the
nurse's charge, and go out with her husband in the great family sleigh
for what might be the last ride of the season.

They had been far up the road--to Arcularius's, maybe, there swinging
around and whirling back. They had flown down the long country road, and
back into the city, to meet--it was early in the day--the great
procession of sleighing folk streaming northward up Broadway. It was one
of New York's great, irregular, chance-set carnivals, and every sleigh
was out, from the "exquisite's" gilded chariot, a shell hardly larger
than a fair-sized easy-chair, to the square, low-hung red sledge of the
butcher-boy, who braved it with the fashionables, his _Schneider_-made
clothes on his burly form, and his girl by his side, in her best Bowery
bonnet. Everybody was a-sleighing. The jingle of countless bells fell on
the crisp air in a sort of broken rhythm--a rude _tempo rubato_. It was
fashionable then. But we--we amuse ourselves less boisterously.

They drew up at the door of the Dolph house, and Jacob Dolph lifted his
wife out of the sleigh, and carried her up the steps i