In January 1893 the temperature in Vermont went above freezing for half an hour, around midday, yet it was "dancing, clear, dry, buoyant weather. Last night the glass marked 15 below Zero and 22° in some of the river valley farms but the air was dead still with a sparkle in it. Day after day the sun comes up in a cloudless sky, burns across the snow and goes out, clear to the last glitter. There is neither dust nor smoke nor defilement of any kind. Even the snow does not cling to the boot but kicks up like fine sugar so frozen it is." The young storyteller waxes warm about his new Brattleboro home in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling: Volume 2, edited by Thomas Pinney for Macmillan.
"The trees are Emperors with their crowns on and icicles five to six feet long hang from our eaves. It's all like life in a fairy tale – life when one sings and shouts for joy of being alive. I had to go out the other day with a hand-sleigh ('coasters' they are called) and slide down the snow-swathed side of a pasture many times because the motion was good and the air was making me drunk." Six inches of snow have fallen "but the Lord is just, and our winter allowance is six feet. We shall get it anon. Can you imagine life running on sleighs – calculated, arranged and controlled by the snow, for four months of the year?" If it sounds cheerless, he says, he gets by without a wrap round his throat and has had neither "a cold or a cough since August last."