240 WINTER PICTURES. 



the snow. Near the top the hill was girded with a 

 bank of snow that blotted out the stone wall and 

 every vestige of the earth beneath. These hills 

 wear this belt till May, and sometimes the plow 

 pauses beside them. From the top of the ridge an 

 immense landscape in immaculate white stretches be- 

 fore us. Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and 

 padded by the stainless element, hang upon the sides 

 of the mountains, or repose across the long sloping 

 hills. The fences of stone walls show like half ob- 

 literated black lines. I turn nay back to the sun, or 

 shade my eyes with my hand. Every object or 

 movement in the landscape is sharply revealed ; one 

 could see a fox half a league. The farmer foddering 

 his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or leading his 

 horse to water, the pedestrian crossing the hill below 

 the children wending their way toward the distant 

 Bchool-house, the eye cannot help but note them ; 

 they are black specks upon square miles of luminous 

 white. What a multitude of sins this unstinted char- 

 ity of the snow covers ! How it flatters the ground ! 

 Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would 

 never suspect that that .gentle slope with its pretty 

 dimples and curves was not the smoothest of mead- 

 ows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone. 



But what is that black speck creeping across that 

 cleared field near the top of the mountain at the head 

 of the valley, three quarters of a mile away ? It is 

 like a fly moving across an illuminated surface. A 

 distant mellow bay floats to us and we know it is the 



