| | 1 | Author: | Thompson
Daniel P.
(Daniel Pierce)
1795-1868 | Add | | | Title: | Locke Amsden, The schoolmaster  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | Our story, contrary perhaps to fashionable precedent,
opens at a common farm-house, situated on one of the principal
roads leading through the interior of the northerly
portion of the Union. It was near the middle of the day,
in that part of the spring season when the rough and chill
features of winter are becoming so equally blended with the
soft and mild ones of summer upon the face of nature, that
we feel at loss in deciding whether the characteristics of the
one or the other most prevail. The hills were mostly bare,
but their appearance was not that of summer; and the tempted
eye turned away unsatisfied from the cheerless prospect which
their dreary and frost-blackened sides presented. The levels,
on the other hand, were still covered with snow; and yet their
aspect was not that of winter. Clumps of willows, scattered
along the hedges, or around the waste-places of the meadows,
were white with the starting buds or blossoms of spring.
The old white mantle of the frost-king was also becoming
sadly dingy and tattered. Each stump and stone was enclosed
by a widening circle of bare ground; while the tops
of the furrows, peering through the dissolving snows, were
beginning to streak, with long, faint, dotted lines, the self-disclosing
plough-fields. The cattle were lazily ruminating
in the barn-yard, occasionally lowing and casting a wistful
glance at the bare hills around, but without offering to move
towards them, as if they thought that the prospects there
were hardly sufficient to induce them yet to leave their
winter quarters. The earth-loving sheep, however, had
broken from their fold, and, having reached the borders of
the hills by some partially trod path, were busily nibbling at
the roots of the shriveled herbage, unheedful of the bleating
cries of their feebler companions, that they had left stuck in
the treacherous snow-drifts, encountered in their migrations
from one bare patch to another. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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