Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Prologue: Epistlers of the Revolution
- 1 Commencement of a Civil War
- 2 Melted Majesty
- 3 Barren as a Pitch-Pine Plain
- 4 Life of a Cabbage
- 5 Hurried through Life on Horseback
- 6 Touch and Go is a Good Pilot
- 7 War and Greet Brittain
- 8 Keeping the Belly and Back from Grumbling, and the Kitchen-Fire from Going Out
- 9 The Mysteries of Lucina
- 10 Patience and Flannel
- Epilogue: Let Passion be Restrain'd within thy Soul
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - The Mysteries of Lucina
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Prologue: Epistlers of the Revolution
- 1 Commencement of a Civil War
- 2 Melted Majesty
- 3 Barren as a Pitch-Pine Plain
- 4 Life of a Cabbage
- 5 Hurried through Life on Horseback
- 6 Touch and Go is a Good Pilot
- 7 War and Greet Brittain
- 8 Keeping the Belly and Back from Grumbling, and the Kitchen-Fire from Going Out
- 9 The Mysteries of Lucina
- 10 Patience and Flannel
- Epilogue: Let Passion be Restrain'd within thy Soul
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
A heavy New Hampshire snowstorm ushered in the new year of 1784. ‘Snow-drifts are six feet deep’, wrote Belknap, ‘and ’tis at least three feet on a level. Our people are now turning out to break the paths’. The air was bitter cold, the sky grey – a lonely, forbidding environment, yet peaceful all the same. ‘We have had scarce any Aurora Boreales this autumn and winter’. The Shakers, a peculiar New England religious sect given to extravagant claims, incorporated eschatology into astronomy, claiming that the aurora ‘are entirely ceased’. Belknap wondered: ‘Have you any of those creatures in Pennsylvania?’
Meanwhile Hazard was cold and ill with rheumatism. ‘I believe I caught cold in consequence of changing my cloaths’, which would seem to be, nevertheless, an utter necessity. Belknap's letter describing his punning uncle Mather Byles and his wit ‘made me laugh very heartily’. Hazard, like Belknap fascinated by the weather, reported that ‘we have had, a few days past, a deep snow; on Monday and Tuesday, a remarkable thaw, accompanied with a thick fog; yesterday it was clear and cold; to-day, very cold, and the [Delaware] river fast’. Reporting news of the son for the father, Hazard reassured Belknap that ‘Josey is well’. Aitken, crotchety, ‘says “he does not know what is in him, but the folks downstairs (the workmen) like him, and the folks upstairs (the family) like him”’.
The best day Belknap had in a long time was 13 January.
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- Ebenezer Hazard, Jeremy Belknap and the American Revolution , pp. 169 - 192Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014