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Title: The Cold Snap
1898

Author: Edward Bellamy

Release Date: September 21, 2007 [EBook #22715]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE COLD SNAP

By Edward Bellamy

1898

In the extremes of winter and summer, when the weather is either
extraordinarily cold or hot, I confess to experiencing a peculiar sense
of helplessness and vague uneasiness. I have a feeling that a trifling
additional rise or fall of temperature, such as might be caused by any
slight hitch in the machinery of the universe, would quite crowd mankind
out of existence. To be sure, the hitch never has occurred, but what
if it should? Conscious that I have about reached the limit of my own
endurance, the thought of the bare contingency is unpleasant enough to
cause a feeling of relief, not altogether physical, when the rising
or falling mercury begins to turn. The consciousness how wholly by
sufferance it is that man exists at all on the earth is rather forcibly
borne in upon the mind at such times. The spaces above and below zero
are indefinite.

I have to take my vacations as the fluctuations of a rather exacting
business permit, and so it happened that I was, with my wife, passing a
fortnight in the coldest part of winter at the family homestead in New
England. The ten previous days had been very cold, and the cold had "got
into the house," which means that it had so penetrated and chilled the
very walls and timbers that a cold day now took hold of us as it had not
earlier in the season. Finally there came a day that was colder than any
before it. The credit of discovering and first asserting that it was the
coldest day of the season is due to myself,--no slight distinction in
the country, where the weather is always a more prominent topic than
in the city, and the weather-wise are accordingly esteemed. Every one
hastened to corroborate this verdict with some piece of evidence. Mother
said that the frost had not gone off the kitchen window nearest the
stove in all the day, and that was a sign. The