Aftermath / Part second of A Kentucky Cardinal""

aiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled and ringed about with petticoats-like a tree within its layers of bark-that she looks like th

and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes. One evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside the

d, "If it be not that,

t white spear and put h

he said. "But I de

rried on to the stable; for I do not relinquis

s for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in winter. It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who dwell in the Dark Age

and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded

stabled according to their kinds, I climb to the crib in the barn and create a great landslide of the fat ears that is like laughter; and then from every stall what a hearty, healthy chorus of cries and petitions responds to that laughter of the corn! What squeals and grunts persuasive beyond the realms of rhetoric! What a blowing of mellow h

g-box so fast that they pour into the big baskets like streams of melted gold; or, grasping my pitchfork, I stuff the ric

lled! How robust, clean, well-meaning are my thoughts! In

gone into business in town to gratify Georgiana. I think little enough of this business otherwise. Every day I pass through the groove of it with no more intellectual satisfacti

ood for the nightly burning. This evening I could but stop to notice how the turkeys in the tree tops looked like enormous bla

night like this they would freeze stiff, and the least incautious movement of

orner 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 breakfas

rees at such dark winter twilights and listen to the low calls of the birds as they gathered in and sett

ack some three-quarters of a century. Twice the Ohio River has been frozen over, a sight he had never seen. The thermomet

River, New York, and that the Mississippi at Memphis b

iana 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 ch

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 co

nk of it-a whole neighborhood of rabbits hurrying here after dark for the chance of a bare n

ake?" she s

e y

nking about

are

uppose they th

ther no

ace as their almoner and nightly renders me an account of what she has done. This winter gives her a great chance and she adorns it. It seems that never before were so many redbirds in the cedars; and although one subject is never mentio

ing happene

ought my hat, overcoat, ov

," she said,

arating herself from me

e felt myself enti

white pyramids. All that part of the ground was alive with rabbits. Georgiana had spread for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast. It had been done to please me, I knew,

out my notes and drawings for the work on Kentucky birds. Georgiana does not know that they exist; she never shall. With what authority those studies call me still, as with a trumpet from the skies! and I know that trumpet will sound on till my ears are past hearin