omes that people are walking over the ice on East River, New
York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis bears the weight of a man a
hundred yards from the bank.

Behind this winter lay last year's spring of rigors hitherto unknown,
destroying orchards, vineyards, countless tender trees and plants. It
set everybody to talking of the year 1834, when such a frost fell that
to this day it is known as Black Friday in Kentucky; and it gave me
occasion to tell Georgiana a story my grandfather had told me, of how
one night in the wilderness the weather grew so terrible that the wild
beasts came out of the forests to shelter themselves around the cabins
of the pioneers, and how he was awakened by them fighting and crowding
for places against the warm walls and chimney-corners. If he had had
opened his door and crept back into bed, he might soon have had a
buffalo on one side of his fireplace and a bear on the other, with a
wild-cat asleep on the hearth between, and with the thin-skinned deer
left shivering outside as truly as if they had all been human beings.

Such a spring, with its destruction of seed-bearing and nut-hearing
vegetation, followed by a winter that seals under ice what may have
been produced, has spread starvation among the wild creatures. A
recent Sunday afternoon walk in the woods--Georgiana being away from
home with her mother--showed me that part of the earth's surface rolled
out as a vast white chart, on which were traced the desperate travels
of the snow-walkers in search of food. Squirrel, chipmunk, rabbit,
weasel, mouse, mink, fox--their tracks crossed and recrossed, wound in
and out and round and round, making an intricate lace-work beautiful
and pitiful to behold. Crow prints ringed every corn-shock in the
field. At the base of one I picked up a frozen dove--starved at the
brink of plenty. Rabbit tracks grew thickest as I entered my turnip
and cabbage patches, converging towards my house, and coming to a focus
at a group of snow-covered pyramids, in which last autumn, as usual, I
buried my vegetables. I told Georgiana:

"They are attracted by the leaves that Dilsy throws away when she gets
out what we need. Think of it--a whole neighborhood of rabbits
hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare nibble at a possible
leaf." Once that night I turned in bed, restless. Georgiana did the
same.

"Are you awake?" she said, softly.

"Are you?"

"Are you thinking about the rabbits?"

"Ye