Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 232, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 October 1918 — IN GRIP OF WINTER [ARTICLE]

IN GRIP OF WINTER

Black Sea Shore About the Last Word in Desolation. _ There the Great River Danube and Ita Surroundings Present as Dreary a Scene Today aa When Ovid Wrote His “Sorrows.” ■■■■■■ '• . If. you think the warm airs of an eastern Riviera caress the shore of the Black sea, where the blue Danube 'creeps out through as many channels as the reedy Nile’s.xyou need to remake your picture. In case your imagination heeds a little aiding, take down your dusty copy of Ovid’s “Sorrows”—his “Trlstia” —and read once more what he wrote back to unforgiving Rome about his first winter of banishment on that coast It was nineteen centuries ago. But you might suppose he- was telling of this very winter’s work, at Nantucket say, or Montreal. Touch by touch his clever lines draw the picture as plainly as if he jvere a correspondent for a modern syndicate. You feel yourself shivering with him on the whitened plain, beneath the 'flaring stars that circle but never set There at Tomi does the north wind blow, and do they feel that bitterer wind from the north-by-east? It blows, and the fields turn to stone; it tears roofs away, and brings the lookout towers down flat Any snow? Storm treads on storm till here and there the heaped-up and compacted snows lie two winters deep. Of course the brooks are stilled now; the water in the lakes is brittle, It can be dug and shattered. Of a native, what with his pelts and his stitched-up breeches, all you can see is his face; his beard Is white with the cold he sucks through it. No one drinks wine ; it Is passed in lumps ;lf a wine jar Is broken, the wine within it. stands alone Does the great Danube freeze? Its blue currents have hardened into marble. It holds the ships locked fast; not an oar can cleave the waters. Where the pilot steered now men go afoot. No wild Sarmatian lacks a bridge for his greaseless ox-cart. But surely the Black sea itself keeps open? Well, says Ovid, If I had anything So gain by saying what Isn’t so, you might not believe me; but as sure as I am a wretched exile, I have walked that sea dry-shod. Boreas was howling, but he could not raise a wave. Not a bumping dolphin could come through to stretch himself. Oh, Leander, If once upon a time a like sea had been yours, the scandal of your drowning could not have been laid upon the strait you had to swim! And then, with grimmer strokes, Ovid draws the worst part of his picture. For into this winter-bound coast, over the ringing highways of the ice, come savage foes, sweeping down on swift horses; they have poison on their arrow tips, they bring thongs to lash their captives; they fire with torches what they cannot carry off. B-r-r I But if Ovid were alive again In this year of grace, and once more writing from Tomi, or as they call it now, Kustendjl, he would not find the sting of the north wind from the steppes Mb biting than 19 centuries ago, nor the cruelty of man to man less appalling.—Boston Herald,