FIOURS OF SPRING. — 13 
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 sceds 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, shiclded bya 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 
