During the night there is a change.  It thunders and lightens.  Toward morning there is a brilliant display of aurora borealis.  This is a sign of colder weather.

The gardener is in despair; so is the sportsman.  The trout take no pleasure in biting in such weather.

Paragraphs appear in the newspapers, copied from the paper of last year, saying that this is the most severe spring in thirty years.  Every one, in fact, believes that it is, and also that next year the spring will be early.  Man is the most gullible of creatures.

And with reason:  he trusts his eyes, and not his instinct.  During this most sour weather of the year, the anemone blossoms; and, almost immediately after, the fairy pencil, the spring beauty, the dog-tooth violet, and the true violet.  In clouds and fog, and rain and snow, and all discouragement, Nature pushes on her forces with progressive haste and rapidity.  Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves.  In a burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink, the hawthorns give a sweet smell.  The air is full of sweetness; the world, of color.

In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees.  The next day the mercury stands at eighty degrees.  Summer has come.

There was no Spring.

The winter is over.  You think so?  Robespierre thought the Revolution was over in the beginning of his last Thermidor.  He lost his head after that.

When the first buds are set, and the corn is up, and the cucumbers have four leaves, a malicious frost steals down from the north and kills them in a night.

That is the last effort of spring.  The mercury then mounts to ninety degrees.  The season has been long, but, on the whole, successful.  Many people survive it.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

By Charles Dudley Warner

PREFACE

When I consented to prepare this volume for a series, which should deal with the notables of American history with some familiarity and disregard of historic gravity, I did not anticipate the seriousness of the task.  But investigation of the subject showed me that while Captain John Smith would lend himself easily enough to the purely facetious treatment, there were historic problems worthy of a different handling, and that if the life of Smith was to be written, an effort should be made to state the truth, and to disentangle the career of the adventurer from the fables and misrepresentations that have clustered about it.