"Last night I took my first lesson in whist-playing. I learned in one evening to know the king, queen, and jack apart, and to understand what my partner meant when she winked at me.
"The worst of this condition of things is that we shall bear the marks of it all our lives. We are now sixteen daily papers behind the rest of the world, and in those sixteen papers are items known to all the people in all the cities, which will never be known to us. How prices have fluctuated in that time we shall not know—what houses have burned down, what robberies have been committed. When the papers do come, each of us will rush for the latest dates; the news of two weeks ago is now history, and no one reads history, especially the history of one's own country.
"I bought a copy of 'Aurora Leigh' just before the freezing up, and I have been careful, as it is the only copy on the island, to circulate it freely. It must have been a pleasant visitor in the four or five households which it has entered. We have had Dr. Kane's book and now have the 'Japan Expedition.'
"The intellectual suffering will, I think, be all. I have no fear of scarcity of provisions or fuel. There are old houses enough to burn. Fresh meat is rather scarce because the English steamer required so much victualling. We have a barrel of pork and a barrel of flour in the house, and father has chickens enough to keep us a good while.
"There are said to be some families who are in a good deal of suffering, for whom the Howard Society is on the lookout. Mother gives very freely to Bridget, who has four children to support with only the labor of her hands.
"The Coffin School has been suspended one day on account of the heaviest storm, and the Unitarian church has had but one service. No great damage has been done by the gales. My observing-seat came thundering down the roof one evening, about ten o'clock, but all the world understood its cry of 'Stand from under,' and no one was hurt. Several windows were blown in at midnight, and houses shook so that vases fell from the mantelpieces.
"The last snow drifted so that the sleighing was difficult, and at present the storm is so smothering that few are out. A. has been out to school every day, and I have not failed to go out into the air once a day to take a short walk.
"January 24. We left the mercury one below zero when we went to bed last night, and it was at zero when we rose this morning. But it rises rapidly, and now, at eleven A.M., it is as high as fifteen. The weather is still and beautiful; the English steamer is still safe at her moorings.
"Our little club met last night, each with a sonnet. I did the best I could with a very bad subject. K. and E. rather carried the honors away, but Mr. J. M.'s was very taking. Our 'crambo' playing was rather dull, all of us having exhausted ourselves on the sonnets. We seem to have settled ourselves quietly into a tone of resignation in regard to the weather; we know that we cannot 'get out,' any more than Sterne's Starling, and we know that it is best not to fret.
"The subject which I have drawn for the next poem is 'Sunrise,' about which I know very little. K. and I continue to learn twenty lines of poetry a day, and I do not find it unpleasant, though the 'Deserted Village' is rather monotonous.