world; broad openings of brown earth are seen everywhere, in the fields and on the hill-sides. The roads are deep with mud; the stage-coaches are ten and eleven hours coming the twenty-two miles over the hills, from the railroad north of us.
The Phœbe birds have arrived as well as the robins. In many parts of the country, their return is looked upon as the signal for beginning to make garden, but that would not do here; there is too much frost in the ground for the spade. They are making hot-beds, however, in spite of the snow banks still lying in many gardens; early lettuce and radishes are raised in this way, and both melons and tomatoes require to be helped forward by the same process to ripen their fruits thoroughly in this highland region. There is a sort of tradition in the village, that the climate has undergone a degree of change since the arrival of the first colonists; the springs are said to have become more uncertain, and the summers less warm; so say elderly people who knew the place forty years since. The same remark is frequently heard, also, in settlements of about the same date as this, on the St. Lawrence, and the Genesee. But there may be some self-deception in the case, for we are naturally more apt to feel the frost of to-day, than that of last year, and memory may very possibly have softened the climate to those who look back from age to youth. There seems, however, some positive foundation for the assertion, since it is a fact well known, that fruits which succeeded here formerly, are now seldom ripened. Water-melons were raised here without hot-beds forty years since, and a thriving little vineyard existed on the same spot where the grapes have been cut off by frost every season for the last ten years.
Friday, 24th.—The first plant that shows the influence of the
