The Portland daily press., 1882-03-10
A Frzeburg Landscape.
From "a Modern Instance by W. D. Howells,
the Century.1


From "a Modern Instance by W. D. Howells, in
the Century.l
The village stood on wide plain, and around
it rose the mountains. They were green to
their tops in Summer, and in Winter white
through their serried pines and drifting mist,
but at every season serious and beautiful, fur
rowed with hollow shadows, and taking the
light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crsg.
The river swan through the plain in long
curves, and slipped away at last through an
unseen pass to the southwark, tracing q score
of miles in its course over space that meas
ured but three or four. The plain was very
fertile, and its features, If few and of purely
utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and
there was tropical riot of vegetation when
the sun of July beat ON those northern fields.
They waved with corn and oats to the feet Of
the mountains, and the potatoes covered q
vast acreage with the lines Of their intense,
coarse green; the meadows were deep with
English grass to the banks of the river, that,
doubling and returning upon itself, still marked
its way with dense fringe Of alders and white
birches,
But Winter was full half the year. The
snow began at Thanksgiving, and fell snow
upon snow till Fast Day, thawing between the
storms, and packing harder and harder against
he breakup in the Spring, when it covered
the ground in solid levels three feet high, and
lay heaped in drifts, that defed thel sun far
into May. When it did not snow the weather
was keenly clear and commonly very still.
Then the landscape at noon had a stereoscopic
glister under the high sun that burned in a
heaven without cloud, and at setting stained
the sky and the white waste with freezing pink
and violet. On such days the farmers and
lumbermen came into the village stores, and
made stiff and feeble stir about their door.
ways, and the school children gave the street
little life and color, as they went to and from
the Academy in their red and blue woolens.
| Four times day the mill, the shrill wheeze OF
| whose saws had become part of the habitual
| silence, blew its whistle for the hands to begin
| and leave off work, in blasts that seemed to
| shatter themselves against the thin air. But
| otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed.
Behind the black boles of the elms that
| swept the vista uf the street with the fine gray
| tracery of their boughs, stood the houses deep
| sunken in the accommodating snow drifts,
| through which each householder kept pa tn
| cut from his doorway to the road, white and
| clean as if hewn out of marble. Some cross
streets struggled away east and west with the
poorer dwellings; but this that followed the
| northward and southwark reach of the PLAIN,
| was the main thorougnfare ana nad ltS own
| impressiveness, with those square white houses
] which they build so large in northern New
| England. They were all kept in scrupulous
| repair, though here and there the frost and
| thaw of many winters had heaved a fence out
| of plumb, and threatened the poise of the mon
umental urns of painted pine on the gate-posts.
| They had dark green blinds, of a color harmo-
| nious with that of the funeral evergreens IN
| their door-yards; and they themselves had
| taken the tone of the snowy landscape, as II BY
| the operation of some such law as blanches the
| fur-bearing animals Of the North. They
| seemed proper to its desolation, while some
houses of more modern taste, painted to a
\ warmer tone, loos ed, with their mansard roofs
and jig-sawed piazzas and balconies, intrusive
/ and alien.
! At one end of the street stood the Academy,
| with its classic facade and its belfry; midway
| was the hotel, with the stores, the printing Of
| fee, and the churches, and at the other ex-
treme, one of the square white mansions stood
| advanced from the rank of tho rest, at the top
4 of deep plunging valley, defining itself
\ against the mountains beyond so sharply that
it seemed as if cut out of its dark, wooded side.
/ 1t was from the gate before this house, dis
I tinct in the pink light which the sunset had
| left, that, on Saturday evening in February.
cutter gay with red-lined robes. dashed away
and came muscally clashing down the street
| under the naked elms.