title: Of Meadows and Flowers: and Crying and Hope
author: Patricia Larsted
description: Patricia Larsted lives with her family and dog in central Massachusetts. Now in college, she is still writing.
zlib_text: THANKFUL BLOSSOM
  1
  THANKFUL BLOSSOM
  by BRET HARTE
  
  THANKFUL BLOSSOM
  2
  I
   The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New
  Jersey.
  It was bitterly cold.  A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the
  mud of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring on
  the Baskingridge road.  The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts left by
  baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay stark and
  cold in the waning light of an April day.  There were icicles on the fences,
  a rime of silver on the windward bark of maples, and occasional bare spots
  on the rocky protuberances of the road, as if Nature had worn herself out
  at the knees and elbows through long waiting for the tardy spring.  A few
  leaves disinterred by the thaw became crisp again, and rustled in the wind,
  making the summer a thing so remote that all human hope and conjecture
  fled before them.
  Here and there the wayside fences and walls were broken down or
  dismantled; and beyond them fields 