The Project Gutenberg EBook of Thankful Blossom, by Bret Harte

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Title: Thankful Blossom

Author: Bret Harte

Posting Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #2177]
Release Date: May, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THANKFUL BLOSSOM ***

THANKFUL BLOSSOM

by

BRET HARTE

I

The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New
Jersey.

It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the mud
of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring on
the Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts left
by baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay stark
and cold in the waning light of an April day. There were icicles on
the fences, a rime of silver on the windward bark of maples, and
occasional bare spots on the rocky protuberances of the road, as if
Nature had worn herself out at the knees and elbows through long
waiting for the tardy spring. A few leaves disinterred by the thaw
became crisp again, and rustled in the wind, making the summer a thing
so remote that all human hope and conjecture fled before them.

Here and there the wayside fences and walls were broken down or
dismantled; and beyond them fields of snow downtrodden and discolored,
and strewn with fragments of leather, camp equipage, harness, and
cast-off clothing, showed traces of the recent encampment and
congregation of men. On some there were still standing the ruins of
rudely constructed cabins, or the semblance of fortification equally
rude and incomplete. A fox stealing along a half-filled ditch, a wolf
slinking behind an earthwork, typified the human abandonment and
desolation.

One by one the faint sunset tints faded from the sky; the far-off
crests of the Orange hills grew darker; the nearer files of pines on
the Whatnong Mountain became a mere black background; and, with the
coming-on of night, came too an icy silence that seemed to stiffen and
arrest the very wind itself. The crisp leaves no longer rustled; the
waving whips of alder and willow snapped no longer; the icicles no
longer dropped a cold fruitage fro