A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33 



packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear 

 your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if every 

 one of them had been swept by that inspired thumb of 

 Phidias s journeyman. 



Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those 

 light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water with 

 a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial deluge has 

 left plain marks of its course ; and in gullies through which 

 it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed irregularly scooped 

 like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered 

 spots, traced with outlines like those left by the sliding edges 

 of the surf upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an 

 infinitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall 

 have to drink when the State does her whole duty as a moral 

 reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail you 

 will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find that you 

 have more neighbours and night visitors than you dreamed 

 of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ; here a dog has 

 looked in on you like an amateur watchman to see if all is 

 right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy treachery. And 

 look ! before you were up in the morning, though you were 

 a punctual courtier at the sun s levee, here has been a 

 squirrel zigzagging to and fro like a hound gathering the 

 scent, and some tiny bird searching for unimaginable 

 food, perhaps for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that 

 drew this slender continuous trail like those made on the 

 wet beach by light borderers of the sea. The earliest auto 

 graphs were as frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or 

 giant birds made their mark, on pre-Adamite sea-margins ; 

 and the thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden 

 passion there ; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern- 

 leaves on the soft ooze of aeons that dozed away their dream 

 less leisure before consciousness came upon the earth with 

 man. Some whim of nature locked them fast in stone for 

 us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us shall leave a 

 footprint as imperishable as that of the ornithorhyncus, or 

 much more so than that of these Bedouins of the snow-desert ? 

 Perhaps it was only because the ripple and the rain-drop and 

 the bird were not thinking of themselves, that they had such 

 luck. The chances of immortality depend very much on 

 that. How often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a 

 season s notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid 



D 



