The
ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought
in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain
falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and
as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are
incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree
made all of glass--glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside
of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles--the frozen drip.
Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round
beads--frozen tears.
The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a
sky without a shred of cloud in it--and everything is still, there is not
a breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm
goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets,
flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon
the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody
stirs. All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting
waiting for the miracle.
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