Newport weekly independent., 1902-01-10

get the freless hearth and the thin garments and the hacking cough and the rheumatic twinge of those who through Restitution find life in win ter an agony.
 Oh, the might of the cold! The arc tic and antarctic invading the temper ate zone! The victories of the frost as when the Thames in 1905 became firm as any bridge and the inhabitants crossed and recrossed on the ice and booths and places of temporary amuse- ment were built on the hardened sur face; as when many years ago New York harbor was paved with ice SO that the people passed on foot to the adjoining islands. But the full story of the cold will never be known. The lips which would have told it were frozen and the fingers that would have written 1t were benumbed. Only here and there fact appears. In 1891 the cold was so terrific that the wolves en- tered Vienna. In 146S it was so cold that wine was cut with hatchets and distributed among the soldiers. In 1234 whole forest was killed by the cold at Ravenna. In 763 the Black sea was frozen over. As we go further back the frosts are mightier, but "a S we come further down the frosts lessen. The worst seventies have been halted and the snows have lost their depths, and the thermometers announce less terrific falls of temperature, and the time will come when the year will be one long summer of foliage and bloom While the worlds moral condition will be reformed, the worst climates will be corrected. You could not have a millenium with January blast pos sible
 Behold, also, as it is possible in no other month of the year, the wondrous anatomy of the trees in January, the leaves of the last year all gone and not so much as a bud of new botan- ical wardrobe appearing, the trees standing with arms stretched toward heaven, one of the greatest evidences of the wisdom and the power of the Creator. The leaves appear only once and then die, but these great arms are stretched up toward heaven in silent prayer for scores of years, now mailed with ice, now robed in snow or lowing to the God of the tempests as He passes in the midnight hurricane In July the trees stand glorifying the earth; in January they stand defying the winter. Under the same tree the child plays with his toy and, growing up to manhood, sits under it in senti- mental or philosophical mood and, hav- ing passed on to old age, rests himself under it's shade. In these January days the trees seem to say: "The leaves that rustled their music in the last summer are dead and gone, but the leaves that will adorn this uncovered brow and these bare arms shall have as much beauty and glory as their predecessors. Only wait. There are beautiful and lovely things to come in my tree life, IS there are beautiful and lovely things to come in your life, o human specta- tor" Oh, the tree! Only the Almighty and the Infinite could have made one Gothic architecture was suggested by it. But for the arch of it's bough and the pointing of it's branches the St. Chapelle of Paris and other specimens of Gothic arch would never have been lifted. No wonder the world has taken from it many styles of suggestiveness -the laurel for the victor, the willow for the sorrowing, the aspen for the trembling, the cypress for the burial! But, unlike ourselves, they cannot change their place and so stand watch ing all that passes. Some of them are solemn monuments of the centuries Thank God for trees, their beauty, their shelter, their interlacing branches mot only for the trees in June time coronation, but in January privation of everything but graceful structure! Let the iconoclastic ax not be lifted against them. "Woodman, spare that tree"
 Behold, also in this January month the increasing daylight. Last month the sun went down at 4:3O, but in this month the days are getting longer. The sunrise and the sunset are farther apart. Sunlight instead of artificial light, and there is for our dear old bat tered earth growing light. "The day spring from on high hath visited us.' We shall have more light for the home, more light for the church, more light for the nation, more light for the world light of intelligence, light of comfort, light of rescue, light fevangelization light from the face of God, light from the throne. But you say, the light in creases so slowly each day of this Jan