r the snow's white resistance, when the roads became soft and
almost impassable, and spring began peeping at the wintry world in
brilliant sunrises and sunsets.

When the young minister of Glenoro found that the long winter evenings,
in which he had planned to accomplish so much, had gone, he could not
help looking back over the past season of feverish activity with
regret. One evening in early spring as he walked down the great
stairway that led into Glenoro he was reviewing his winter's work with
the feeling of self-dissatisfaction that was so common to him now.
Every step he took seemed to lead him into greater depths of
despondency.

The evening was one which might have raised the most discouraged soul.
Before him lay the white valley overspread with the soft radiance of a
late winter sunset. The gold of the hilltops where the sun's rays had
full play, the soft rose, the delicate green and the faint lilac where
the shadows of the valley met and mingled with the brightness, the deep
purple-and-grey tones of the woods by the river made a picture such as
only the magic of winter can paint. The air was motionless, and the
smoke from the houses in the village rose in stately columns straight
into the still atmosphere, colourless and ethereal in the shadow of the
hills, but changing into pearl-white as they rose beyond their rim, and
blossoming, where the sun's rays caught them, into gigantic
frost-flowers of rose and amethyst and violet.

The noise of children playing on the millpond, the barking of a dog,
the musical clang of Peter McNabb's anvil arose to the hills where the
minister walked. Away across the valley a sleigh was moving slowly
down the winding road; he could hear the clear tinkle of the bells as
though they were at his side.

But the young man was too absorbed in his own sad reflections to notice
his surroundings. He was asking himself what progress he had made in
Glenoro with his tremendous activity and his multiplicity of meetings?
What had he accomplished in the past winter? He thought with disgust
of the Canadian Patriotic Society. He had given up the revival
services for the concert and Mr. Watson's romantic nonsense, with the
result that it had brought upon him both ridicule and discredit. He
could not help wondering, now that he was on such intimate terms with
all the young people of the congregation, what was to be the result.
Were the pleasant relations he had established to be the mea