WHEN THE SNOW CAME 



an inch or two deep and covered with an 

 icy crust that broke underfoot with a 

 great noise and effectually scared away 

 any woodland thing that you approached, 

 provided it had powers of locomotion. 

 Fox or crow, partridge or rabbit, must 

 have thought that Gulliver was once 

 more walking in among the Lilliputians 

 with his very biggest boots on. Never 

 were such thunderous footsteps heard in 

 my wood, at least not since the last icy 

 crust. Frozen in the icy surface were 

 the trails that had been made when the 

 snow was soft, the squirrel's long, plung- 

 ing leaps with his hind feet dropping into 

 the hole his front feet had made, giving 

 something you might mistake for deer 

 tracks, except that they went back up the 

 tree. You saw where the crow had 

 dropped to earth and trailed his aristo- 

 cratically long hind toe, with its incurv- 



