“Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here,” and with a few deep, dexterous cuts soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of pitcher plants, the strange, almost uncanny leaves filled with muddy water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted by a master potter’s hand.
We wrapped it all carefully in newspapers, and put it in the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerful and as full of joy in the season as we could possibly have been in June.
No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June. January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chillblains, frozen water pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and automobile troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in June. I have not room in this essay to tell all that June is; besides, this is a story of January.
What I was saying is that we started home all abloom with our pitcher plants, and gold thread, and partridge berry, and holly, and black alder, all aglow inside with our vigorous tramp, with the grey, grave beauty of the landscape, with the stern joy of meeting and beating the cold, and with the signs of life—of the cosy muskrats in their lodge beneath the ice cap on the meadow; with the hairy woodpecker in his deep, warm hole in the heart of the tree; with the red-warm berries in our basket; with the chirping, the conquering chickadee accompanying us and singing—
“For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin;
And polar frost my form defied
Made of the air that blows outside.”
And actually as we came over the bleak meadow one of the boys said he thought he heard a song sparrow singing; and I thought the pussywillows by the brook had opened a little since we passed them coming out; and we all declared the weather had changed, and that there were signs of a break-up. But the thermometer stood at fifteen above zero when we got home—one degree colder than when we started! So we concluded that the January thaw must have come off inside of us; and if the colour of the four glowing faces is any sign, that was the correct reading of the weather.
THE SNOW MAN
Hans Christian Andersen