After my first visit to Boston, I spent almost every winter in the North. Once I went on a visit to a New England village with its frozen lakes and vast snow fields. It was then that I had opportunities such as had never been mio enter into the treasures of the snow.
I recall my surprise on disc that a mysterious hand had stripped the trees and bushes, leaving only here and there a wrinkled leaf. The birds had flown, and their empty s in the bare trees were filled with snow.
Winter was on hill and field. The earth seemed benumbed by his icy touch, and the very spirits of the trees had withdrawn to their roots, and there, curled up in the dark, lay fast asleep. All life seemed to have ebbed away, and evehe sun shohe day was Shrunk and cold, As if her veins were sapless and old, And she rose up decrepitly For a last dim look at earth and sea.
The withered grass and the bushes were transformed into a forest of icicles.
Then came a day when the chill air portended a snowstorm. We rushed out-of-doors to feel the first few tiny flakes desding. Hour by hour the flakes dropped silently, softly from their airy height to the earth, and the try became more and more level. A snowy night closed upon the world, and in the m one could scarcely reize a feature of the landscape. All the roads were hidden, not a single landmark was visible, only a waste of snow with trees rising out of it.
In the evening a wind from the northeast sprang up, and the flakes rushed hither and thither in furious melee.
Around the great fire we sat and told merry tales, and frolicked, and quite fot that we were in the midst of a desolate solitude, shut in from all unication with the outside world. But during the night the fury of the wind increased to such a degree that it thrilled us with a vague terror. The rafters creaked and strained, and the branches of the trees surrounding the house rattled a against the windows, as the winds rioted up and down the try.
Ohird day after the beginning of the storm the snow ceased. The sun broke through the clouds and shone upon a vast, undulating white plain. High mounds, pyramids heaped in fantastic shapes, and imperable drifts lay scattered in every dire.
Narrow paths were shoveled through the drifts. I put on my cloak and hood a out. The air stung my cheeks like fire. Half walking ihs, half w our way through the lesser drifts, we succeeded in reag a pine grove just outside a broad pasture. The trees stood motionless and white like figures in a marble frieze. There was no odour of pine-needles. The rays of the sun fell uporees, so that the twigs sparkled like diamonds and dropped in showers wheouched them. So dazzling was the light, it peed even the darkhat veils my eyes.
As the days wore on, the drifts gradually shrunk, but before they were wholly gone aorm came, so that I scarcely felt the earth under my feet once all winter. At intervals the trees lost their icy c, and the bulrushes and underbrush were bare; but the lake lay frozen and hard beh the sun.
Our favourite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the waters edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For