was brown and white? Lo, it is blue and rose and silver--nothing else!"
And we look, and it is so. On that other evening, in the fog, the world
had been all gray--black-gray and pale gray and silver gray. On this
evening winter said: "Gray? Not at all. You shall have brown and gold.
Behold and marvel!"

I marveled. There was a sweep of golden marsh, under a gold sky, and at
its borders low lines of trees etched in rich brown masses, and my
sentinel cedars standing singly or by twos and threes--cedars in their
winter tones of olive brown, dull almost to harshness, holding
themselves stiffly against the great wind, yielding only at their
delicate tips when the gusts came, recovering again in the lulls, to
point dauntlessly skyward. The narrow boundary ditches, already glassing
over in the sudden cold, stretched away in rigid lines, flashing back
the light of the sky in shivers of gold. The haystacks reiterated the
color notes--gold on their sunset side, deep brown on their shadowed
one.

There is a moment sometimes, just at sundown, when the quality of light
changes. It does not fall upon the world from without, it radiates from
within. Things seem self-luminous. Yet, for all their brightness, we see
them less clearly, one's vision is dazzled, enmeshed. It is the time
when that wondrous old word "faerie" finds its meaning. It is a magic
moment. It laid its spell upon us.

Jonathan emerged first, bracing himself. "It will shut down soon. We
haven't a minute to spare. We ought to be on the creek now."

It was hard to believe that such brightness could ever shut down. But it
did. By the time we reached the creek the gold had vanished, except for
a narrow line in the western sky. The world lay in clear, brown
twilight, and the wind swept over it.

Jonathan got more hay, and this time I saw the haystack from which he
plucked it. I threw myself on it, collar up, cap down, lying as low as
possible.

"Bad night for ducks, of course," growled Jonathan. "If only the thaw
had held twelve hours more! However--"

He swung off to some chosen spot of his own.

I lay there and the wind surged over me. There was nothing to stop it,
nothing to make it noisy. It sang a little around the flap of my coat,
it swished a little in the short marsh grass, but chiefly it rushed by
above me, in invisible, soundless might. It seemed as if it must come
between me and the stars, but it did not, and I watched them appear, at
first one by one,