38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



11 The fanned snow 



That s bolted by the northern blasts twice o er,&quot; 

 &quot; Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, 

 Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds,&quot; 



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 autographs 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 dreamless leisure before consciousness 

 came upon the earth with man. Some whim of nature 



