Now, Jem, get out
the hounds; how do you take them, Tom?"
"Why, that darned Injun, Jem, he'll take them in my lumber wagon--and, I
say, Jem, see that you don't over-drive old roan--away with you, and
rouse up Garry, he means to go, I guess!"
After a mighty round of punch, in which, as we were now departing, one
half at least of the village joined, we all got under Way; Tom, buttoned
up to the throat in a huge white lion skin wrap-rascal, looking for all
the world like a polar bear erect on its hind legs; and all of us
muffled up pretty snugly, a proceeding which was rendered necessary by a
brisk bracing north-west breeze. The sky, though it was scarcely the
first twilight of an autumnal dawn, was beautifully clear, and as
transparent--though still somewhat dusky--as a wide sheet of crystal; a
few pale stars were twinkling here and there; but in the east a broad
gray streak changing on the horizon's edge to a faint straw color,
announced the sun's approach.
The whole face of the country, hill, vale, and woodland, was overspread
by an universal coat of silvery hoar-frost; thin wreaths of snowy mist
rising above the tops of the sere woodlands, throughout the whole length
of the lovely vale, indicated as clearly as though it were traced on a
map, the direction of the stream that watered it; and as we paused upon
the brow of the first hillock, and looked back toward the village, with
its white steeples and neat cottage dwellings buried in the still repose
of that early hour, with only one or two faint columns of blue smoke
worming their way up lazily into the cloudless atmosphere, a feeling of
regret--such as has often crossed my mind before, when leaving any place
wherein I have spent a few days happily, and which I never may see more
--rendered me somewhat indisposed to talk.
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