Page from the book "Adventures in Science with Bob and Don" by Harry Carpenter, Guy Bailey and Bernice Stroetzel (Allyn and Bacon, 1940)

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The way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;
His withered cheeks and tresses gray
Seem'd to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the Bards was he,
who sung of Border chivalry;
For welladay! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and opress'd,
Wish'd to be with them, and at rest.

(illustration from The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, published by Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, NY, 1888.) My copy is inscribed with what I imagine is a quill dipped in ink: "To Stella, Xmas '91."

Note: that would be 1891, not 1991.

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(At this point in the poem, the wizard Frost is perched in a frost-covered pine tree)

- - - - -

Frost came down a little lower waved his mace again, and whispered to her more tenderly, more softly: "Are you warm?" -- "I'm warm, my dearest." Warm -- yet she is growing numb. Frost has touched her; he breathes into her face and scatters over her sharp needles from his white beard. And now he has come down and stands in front of her. "Are you warm?" he murmured once more, and suddenly turned into Proklushka (*her dead husband), and started to kiss her. The white haired wizard kissed her on the lips, the eyes, and the shoulders, and whispered to her the same sweet words which her lover whispered at wedding-time. And so happy was Dar'ya to listen to his sweet words...

- - - - -

Excerpt from "Frost, the Red-Nosed," a poem by Nikolay (Nikolai) Nekrasov. In Nekrasov's poem, General Frost (or Moroz) is personified as a cruel wintry wizard, a Russian "Jack Frost" perhaps, wooing the widow Dar'ya as she gathers firewood after her husband's funeral, causing her to freeze to death.

Page from The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, first edition paperback (pubished by Penguin Books, Baltimore, MD, 1962).

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I can't decide which version is my favorite: the novel's cover (warm, worn, atmospheric) or the same illustration in black and white, with the melodramatic caption:

"KEEP IT SAFE, OLD PINE... AND BLESS HIM, DEAR GOD, AND GUARD HIM EVERMORE."

From The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr. with illustrations by F. C. Yohn. (First edition, published by Grosset & Dunlap, NY, 1908.)

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Front cover: T-Rex.
Back cover: Woolly Mammoth.
"Let the hunt begin!"

Seriously, these creatures did not coexist. I think I knew that, even as a kid.

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