It was almost mid-April; and still the silvery-green tassels on the wistaria showed no hint of the blue petals folded within; but the maples' leafless symmetry was already veined with fire.

Faint perfume from Long Island woodlands, wandering puffs of wind from salt meadows freshened the city streets; St.Felix Street boasted a lilac bush in leaf; Oxford Street was gay with hyacinths and a winter-battered butterfly; and in Fort Greene Place the grassy door-yards were exquisite with crocus bloom.

Peace, good-will, and spring on earth; but in men's souls a silence as of winter.
To Northland folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire.

An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,--misty, monstrous, gale-driven before the coming hurricane.
Still, for the Northland, there remained now little of the keener suspense since those first fiery outbursts in the South; but all through the winter the dull pain throbbed in silence as star after star dropped from the old galaxy and fell flashing into the new.
And it was a time of apathy, acquiescence, stupefied incredulity; a time of dull faith in destiny, duller resignation.
The printed news was read day after day by a people who understood nothing, neither the cautious arming nor the bold disarming, nor the silent fall of fortified places, nor the swift dismantling of tall ships--nor did they comprehend the ceaseless tremors of a land slowly crumbling under the subtle pressure--nor that at last the vast disintegration of the matrix would disclose the forming crystal of another nation cradled there, glittering, naming under the splendour of the Southern skies.
A palsied Old Year had gone out.

The mindless old man--he who had been President--went with it.