The Anaconda standard. [volume] (Anaconda, Mont.) 1889-1970, 1899-02-26
GRACE OF THE NEWSFALLEN SNOW
Magic in Conventional Madison Avenue
on the Day After the storm.

A dull day of leaden, threatening
skies came upon the town after the
first February snowstorfa, but neither
leaden skies nor lifeless air could rob
the streets of the grace that came with
the neW-fallen snow. Powdery and
white 1t lay all the morning on the
less frequented streets, breathing up
into the air that invisible something
which, with the thermometer at 40, is a
mere clammy, choking dampness but
with the thermometer at 25 is an eX-
hilarating, frosty delight. Keep clear
of the busy streets on such morning;
let your walk be, for example, south
ward along Madison avenue, below 42d
street, and you may recapture perhaps
for short half-hour that impression,
long vanished with most adults, which
makes an urban snowfall in this eli
mate for children thing of magic and
eyer-fresh surprise and wonder. If the
suburbs take on again their vanished
rural quality under a snowfall the city,
on the other hand, is never more un-
compromisingly urban than beneath
this white visitant from the upper air
To return to Madison avenue, that
thoroughfare is never more the stately
urban street, the dwelling place of a
strictly ordered and conventional civil
izatiOn, than when it's roofs are whiten-
ed and it's chimneys hooded with new
fallen snow.
Doubtless the professional meteorolo-
gist could analyze into parts and learn
eddy label the sum of the impressions
that made every normal boy dwelling
in Madison avenue greet the morning
with a Whoop when he looked out of
his bedroom window on the day after
the last snowfall. To the unscentific
observer it was something that mys-
terious!y appealed to all the senses at
| A. tIn ,r,t,
| winter, tasted of winter, smelled of
winter, looked of winter and sounded
| of winter. The eye saw for smooth
| ashen asphalt, sheet of snow, already
marked of wheels and feet, but glis-
! tening and unsullied: for rectlinear
! broWnstone, everywhere white capped
| balustrades and posts Enthusiastically tur-
| reted. The ear received instead of the
| Gathering trot on bare asphalt and the
| loud rumble and hum of wheels hushed
J footballs on padded ways, and the
| slight crunch of snow crystals, together
with an Understandable impression of the
| freshness of resonance that belongs to
! the air over fields Of snow. The cheeks
had new baptism, not of sea fog, but
baptism of purity. drawn from the
| far heights of air. The noStrils took
in. not the ordinary urban warning in
| cense of creosote and escaped coal gas,
! but WhiffS of true ozone, with its extra
atom of oxygen. But when all the
senses had had their say there re-
manned something yet uninterrupted, a
| residue of impressions addressed to
| some yet unidentified sense, or as Walt
| Whitman says of certain aspects of
| night, directly to the soul itself, resi-
due of impressions embodying the very
| essence of the snowclad city.
| Even grown men and women felt tbs
temptation to whoop and rouse the
echoes of the resonant air, for the mag
ic of the morning was strong upon al
| but the dullest. Men walked as in g
new made world fresh from out the
ether. dazzling in its splendor, uniform.
| " brilliant and shadowless beneath the
low light struggling through the dim
woven cloud-roof. The very houses
| with their new white trimmings seemed
! fresh from the hand of some myste
rious mason. who had wrought while
the city slept. Any miracle might havt
| happened without astonishing SOM
that walked in delighted amaze through
the hushed city, for the last trait o
the. commonplace seemed to have van
ished from familiar scenes, and what
ever manifestation of arctic enchant
ment had issued from those new-mad
houses or started up in the transformed
street would have been of piece Will
the miracle wrought over night.-Nev
York sun.