180 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
vicinity of cold, its fingers are feeling after us, 
and even if they do not clutch us, we know that 
they are there. The sensations of such days 
almost make us associate their clearness and 
whiteness with something malignant and evil. 
Charles Lamb asserts of snow, “It glares too 
much for an innocent color, methinks.” Why 
does popular mythology associate the infernal 
regions with a high temperature instead of a 
low one? El Aishi, the Arab writer, says of 
the bleak wind of the Desert (so writes Rich- 
ardson, the African traveller), “The north wind 
blows with an intensity equalling the cold of 
hell ; language fails me to describe its rigorous 
temperature.” Some have thought that there 
is a similar allusion in the phrase “weeping 
and gnashing of teeth,” — the teeth chattering 
from frost. Milton also enumerates cold as one 
of the torments of the lost, — 
“O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; ” 
and one may sup full of horrors on the exceed- 
ingly cold collation provided for the next world 
by the Norse Edda. 
But after all, there are but few such terrific 
periods in our Massachusetts winters, and the 
appointed exit from their frigidity is usually 
through a snowstorm. After a day of this se- 
vere sunshine there comes commonly a darker 
day of cloud, still hard and forbidding, though 
