LV
AN ICE-STORM
Of all the vagaries of winter weather, one of the rarest is the ice-storm; rain falling with a wind and from a quarter that should bring snow, and freezing as it falls, not penetrating the snow but coating it with a shining armor, sheathing every branch and twig in crystal and fringing eaves with icicles of most fantastic shapes.
On ice-clad roofs and fields and crackling trees the rain still beats with a leaden clatter, unlike any other sound of rain; unlike the rebounding pelting of hail or the swish of wind-blown snow.
The trees begin to stoop under their increasing burden, and then to crack and groan as it is laid still heavier upon them. At times is heard the thin, echoless crash of an overladen branch, first bending to its downfall with a gathering crackle of severed fibres, then with a sudden crash, shattering in a thousand fragments the brief adornments that have wrought its destruction.
Every kind of tree has as marked individuality in its icy garniture as in its summer foliage. The gracefulness of the elms, the maples, the birches, the beeches, and the hornbeams is preserved and even intensified; the clumsy ramage of the butternut and ash is as stiff as ever, though every unbending twig bears its row of glittering pendants. The hemlocks and firs are tents of ice, but the pines are still pines, with every needle exaggerated in bristling crystal.
Some worthless things have become of present value, as the wayside thistles and the bejeweled grass of an unshorn meadow, that yesterday with its dun unsightliness, rustling above the snow, proclaimed the shiftlessness of its owner.
Things most unpicturesque are made beautiful. The wire of the telegraph with its dull undulations is transformed to festoons of crystal fringe, linking together shining pillars of glass that yesterday were but bare, unsightly posts.
The woods are a maze of fantastic shapes of tree growth. Wood roads are barricaded with low arches of ice that the hare and the fox can barely find passage beneath, and with long, curved slants of great limbs bent to the earth. The wild vines are turned to ropes and cables of ice, and have dragged down their strong supports, about whose prostrate trunks and limbs they writhe in a tangle of rigid coils. The lithe trunks of second growth are looped in an intricate confusion of arches one upon another, many upon one, over whole acres of low-roofed forest floor.