MELTING OF SNOW. 103 



other wooden fabrics, through which it passes, is re- 

 laxed ; the withered grass and reeds where these are 

 exposed, moisten, and the rattling and thumping are 

 succeeded by murmuring and harmony, in which, 

 compared with the others, there is a good deal of 

 music; and as the morning advances, and the animals 

 come abroad and man begins to be active, the hard 

 metallic sound is gone, and there is a softness about 

 nature. There is also a delightful transparency in the 

 atmosphere, because the little spiculce. of ice are gone ; 

 and the heat of the air is too much occupied in con- 

 verting the snow and ice into water for changing much 

 of that into vapour. When the change is accompanied 

 by rain, it is far from pleasant at the time, and there 

 is a danger, almost a certain one, that the spring will 

 be treacherous ; and that in consequence of the great 

 waste of heat required for the melting of the snow and 

 the evaporation of the rain together, frosts will return 

 long before the process of thawing, so comparatively 

 slow, is completed. The slow melting of snow by rain, 

 compared with that by a warm atmosphere, which is 

 constantly shifting by the wind, can be easily under- 

 stood, when it is remembered that the water which falls, 

 even if it had the temperature of the greatest summer 

 heat, would be cooled down to the freezing point in 

 melting half its weight in snow. But as the tempera- 

 ture can only be a little above freezing, the water will 

 have the temperature of 32 before it has cooled per- 

 haps one tenth-of its weight ; and as the water is a bad 

 conductor of heat, and great part of the action of the 

 oblique rays of the sun reflected away from its surface, 

 a rainy breaking of a storm is almost sure to be fol- 



