veyor will first reach the centre of the town--and the tavern.
Beginning at sunrise with his own yoke of oxen hitched to a snow-plough,
each road-master breaks through the drift to the nearest neighbor, who
adds his yoke to the other, and so from neighbor to neighbor till
sometimes fifteen or twenty yoke of oxen are hitched in a long line to
the plough. Sometimes a pair of wild young steers are hitched, plunging
and kicking, with the sober elders. By this time the first yoke often
begins to show signs of distress by lolling out the tongue, a sure
symptom of overwork in oxen, and they are left at some farmer's barn to
cool down.

Whittier thus describes the scene of breaking out the winter roads in
his _Snow-Bound_:--

"Next morn we wakened with the shout
Of merry voices high and clear;
And saw the teamsters drawing near
To break the drifted highways out.
Down the long hillside treading slow
We saw the half-buried oxen go,
Shaking the snow from heads uptost,
Their straining nostrils white with frost.
Before our door the straggling train
Drew up, an added team to gain.
The elders threshed their hands a-cold,
Passed, with the cider mug, their jokes
From lip to lip."

Thus are the white snow-waste and the drifted roads turned by cheerful
cooeperation into a midwinter visiting where every neighbor can exchange
greetings with the other, young and old. For of course school does not
keep, and the boys crowd on the snow-plough or try their new snowshoes,
and the men of the various families who do not go with the oxen hitch up
the sleighs, pods, and pungs and follow the snow-plough, and the young
men send a volley of snowballs against every house where any fair maid
lives. And at the tavern in the afternoon is a great sight, greater in
ante-temperance days than now: scores of yoke of oxen at the door, the
horse-sheds full of horses and sleighs, all the lads and men of the
township within. There is rivalry in the method of breaking. One
road-master always used a snow-plough; another lashed an ordinary plough
on either side of a narrow ox-sled; a third used a coarse harrow
weighted down with a group of standing boys. This broke up the drifts in
a wonderful manner. The deeper drifts often have to be shovelled out
partly by hand. After the road to the tavern is broken, the road to the
school-house, the doctor's house, and the meeting-house come next.

The roads thus made we