February — Mild Winters. 53 



XI. 



Mild Winters— Arctic Sleep of Nature — Beauty of Hoar-Fiost — 

 Fairy Work of the Hoar-Frost — One Day — Snow — Wild Boars 

 — The Weasel — He becomes my Gamekeeper — A Snow-storm — 

 Winter Reading — Cowper's Description of the Ice-Palace — Thom- 

 son — His Ficelles — The Man Lost in the Snow. 



OUR winter in the Val Ste. V£ronique had been 

 hitherto one of those mild southern winters 

 which deceive us with promises of a calm transition 

 from the glow of autumn to the green of spring, as if 

 there were nothing between the two seasons but an 

 interval of grayer sky and briefer daylight, without 

 any severity of temperature, or any white enshrouding 

 of the departed year. Rarely, however, does the course 

 of Nature in these latitudes entirely avoid the season of 

 arctic sleep, and if it is delayed till the spring flowers 

 are ready to blossom, it is almost sure to come down 

 suddenly upon the earth, like a fit of somnolence on, a 

 weary human frame. So it happened that one day near 

 the end of February the thermometer went down very 

 rapidly, and every creature that was susceptible of cold 

 began to feel the bracing of a keener air. It was evi- 

 dent that we were to have real winter after all, though 

 probably a very brief one. 



It came upon us in a single night ; and as men have 

 gone to res*t with hair all black or brown, and the next 

 morning looked in the glass and seen a head white like 



