HOURS OF SPRING. ij 



frost stealing away the vital heat — ingenuity could not 

 devise a more terrible scene of torture to the birds. 

 Neither for the thrushes nor for the new-born infants in 

 the tent did the onslaught of the winter slacken. No 

 pity in earth or heaven. This one thrush did, indeed, 

 by some exceptional fortune, survive ; but where were 

 the family of thrushes that had sung so sweetly in the 

 rainy autumn ? Where were the blackbirds ? 



Looking down from the stilts of seven hundred feet 

 into the deep coombe of black oaks standing in the white 

 snow, day by day, built round about with the rugged 

 mound of the hills, doubly locked with the key of frost 

 — it seemed to me to take on itself the actuality of the 

 ancient faith of the Magi. How the seeds of all living 

 things — the germs — of bird and animal, man and insect, 

 tree and herb, of the whole earth — were gathered together 

 into a four-square rampart, and there laid to sleep in 

 safety, shielded by a spell-bound fortification against the 

 coming flood, not of water, but of frost and snow ! With 

 snow and frost and winter the earth was overcome, and 

 the world perished, stricken dumb and dead, swept clean 

 and utterly destroyed — a winter of the gods, the silence 

 of snow and universal death. All that had been passed 

 away, and the earth was depopulated. Death triumphed. 

 But under the snow, behind the charmed rampart, slept 

 the living germs. Down in the deep coombe, where the 

 dark oaks stood out individually in the whiteness of the 

 snow, fortified round about with immovable hills, there 

 was the actual presentment of Zoroaster's sacred story. 

 Locked in sleep lay bud and germ — the butterflies of 

 next summer were there somewhere, under the snow. 

 The earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of 

 life were not dead. Near by were the tents of the gipsies 

 — an Eastern race, whose forefathers perhaps had seen 



