Chapter 16

"What are these,
So withered, and so wild in their attire;
That look not like the inhabitants of earth,
And yet are on't?"

Macbeth.

That sternness of the season, which has already been mentioned in these
pages, is never of long continuance in the month of April. A change in the
wind had been noted by the hunters, even before they retired from their
range among the hills; and though too seriously occupied to pay close
attention to the progress of the thaw, more than one of the young men had
found occasion to remark, that the final breaking up of the winter had
arrived. Long ere the scene of the preceding chapter reached its height,
the southern winds had mingled with the heat of the conflagration. Warm
airs, that had been following the course of the Gulf Stream, were driven
to the land, and, sweeping over the narrow island that at this point forms
the advanced work of the continent, but a few short hours had passed
before they destroyed every chilling remnant of the dominion of winter.
Warm, bland, and rushing in torrents, the subtle currents penetrated the
forests, melted the snows from the fields, and as all alike felt the
genial influence, it appeared to bestow a renovated existence on man and
beast. With morning, therefore, a landscape very different from that last
placed before the mind of the reader, presented itself in the valley of
the Wish-Ton-Wish.

The winter had entirely disappeared, and as the buds had begun to swell
under the occasional warmth of the spring, one ignorant of the past would
not have supposed that the advance of the season had been subject to so
stern an interruption. But the principal and most melancholy change was in
the more artificial parts of the view. Instead of those simple and happy
habitations which had crowned the little eminence, there remained only a
mass of blackened and charred ruins. A few abused and half-destroyed
articles of household furniture lay scattered on the sides of the hill,
and, here and there, a dozen palisadoes, favored by some accidental cause,
had partially escaped the flames. Eight or ten massive and dreary-looking
stacks of chimneys rose out of the smoking piles. In the centre of the
desolation was the stone basement of the block-house, on which still stood
a few gloomy masses of the timber, resembling coal. The naked and
unsupported shaft of the well reared its circular pillar from the centre,
looking like a dark monument of the past. The wide ruin of the
out-buildings blackened one side of the clearing, and, in different
places, the fences, like radii diverging from the common centre of
destruction, had led off the flames into the fields. A few domestic
animals ruminated in the back-ground, and even the feathered