As I set my foot on the door-step, I went back to see whether the two snow-birds were in their nightly places under the roof of the porch—­the guardian spirits of our portal.  There they were, wedged each into a snug corner as tightly as possible, so not to break their feathers, and leaving but one side exposed.  Happening to have some wheat in my pocket, I pitched the grains up to the projecting ledge; they can take their breakfast in bed when they wake in the morning.  Little philosophers of the frost, who even in their overcoats combine the dark side and the white side of life into a wise and weathering gray—­the no less fit external for a man.

The thought of them to-night put me strongly in mind of a former habit of mine to walk under the cedar-trees at such dark winter twilights and listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and settled down.  I have no time for such pleasant ways now, they have been given up along with my other studies.

This winter of 1851 and 1852 has been cold beyond the memory of man in Kentucky—­the memory of the white man, which goes back some three-quarters of a century.  Twice the Ohio River has been frozen over, a sight he had never seen.  The thermometer has fallen to thirty degrees below zero.  Unheard of snows have blocked the two or three railroads we have in the State.

News comes 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,