THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 29 



black amid the great trunks, when the trees are stern 

 and naked with daggers of light between them, a hush 

 of death comes over the winter woods, a beautiful, sol- 

 emn hush, and one instinctively lowers his voice as in 

 the presence of mystery. Yet see where the deer-mice 

 have danced, and where a squirrel has jumped to the 

 foot of an evergreen, burrowed for cones, and emerged 

 again to leave the telltale husks of his meal. Looking 

 at the records on the ground, the woods seem very 

 much alive, alive at hours when we are sleeping, per- 

 haps, and the deer come through. See, here are their 

 tracks, and here a shrub eaten off clean to the snow line. 

 As the snow settles on the face of Nature and becomes 

 a part of it, as the village paths are packed as hard as 

 pavement and the roads glisten with runner tracks, we 

 begin to lose consciousness of tlje first all-pervading 

 whiteness and become aware of the colours in the whiter 

 world. I once kept a diary of the snow for an entire 

 season need I say it was my first season after our ex- 

 odus from the land of bondage? Looking back over its 

 pages, I find descriptions of rhapsodic, not to say start- 

 ling, colour schemes. Here is one: 



"The view from High Pasture this afternoon was lovely. 

 In the southwest, under a canopy of leaden clouds, was a 

 warm red rift over the peak of Tom Ball Mountain, and it 

 tinted the snow in the valley almost to my feet. To the 

 east the sky was clear, a pure mother-of-pearl green and opal, 

 over the long wave line of brilliant ultramarine mountains." 



