The Winter Bell

ume told how earth lay warming, released from winter, uncovered to the sun. Whiffs came now and then from a distant bonfire, aromatic smoke of burning evergreen; these having drifted by, there settled a warm drowsiness through which pine lumber diffused its clean, hearty scent; and in fits of energy, broken by silence and rest, a horsewhip beat on a carpet, volleying broad smacks that echoed. Salem had not gone blind. The feeling of spring ran in his veins, at once languid and restless, a current overcharged with winter vitality which prompted him to be doing yet checked him by a sleepy surfeit. He knew the season for spring, acknowledged the glory ofthe day. He sat on a bench in the town jail of Crossport. The walls that imprisoned him had once been whitewashed, but now were a crazy patchwork of bare lath, of old lime scratched with obscene words and pictures, and of great brown spider-legged stains left by tobacco juice. One barred window, without glass, admitted near the ceiling enough reflection of sunlight to reveal the broken plaster, from which hung little pinches of reddish cow's hair, and darker knobs where some bygone captive, furious or jocose, had flung his quids to dry. It was a doleful room. It was perhaps the worst place on earth, for a woodsman who had always gone free, to sit in and be reminded of the spring. "Don't you go nigh it no more." One self spoke to the other self; and weary of their endless wrangle night and day Salem crouched, elb...