CHAPTER II 

 THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 



SNOW! What a host of pleasant associations the 

 word awakes! Words are but Pandoras, beneficent 

 or otherwise, each lifting the lid from its box of mem- 

 ories and suggestions and loosing them into the fancy. 

 For those of us, at least, who dwell in a land neither of 

 perpetual frost nor perpetual Summer, who expect the 

 delights of a white Christmas and the vernal resurrec- 

 tion of April, the word "snow" is key to one of the 

 choicest of caskets, wherein abide alike the homeliest 

 and heartiest of childhood memories, and the stored 

 impressions of Nature's subtlest of colour values or the 

 cold, quiet recollections of moonlight brooding on a 

 winter world. 



The lid of the crystal casket has been lifted for me by 

 the action of my pen in writing the word. The memory 

 of a room flies out to me, and nestles warmly in my 

 fancy. I am in the room, yet, strangely enough, I 

 seem also for a moment outside looking at the house, 

 with its long hip roof behind, its single huge chimney, its 

 open-sided woodshed filled with log ends to the top, its 



guardian trees. Then the sense of the room steals over 



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