ow.

"Snow comes," said the train official to the station officials; and they
agreed that snow was about to come. And it came, rapidly, plenteously.
The train had not been more than an hour on its journey when the cotton-
wool clouds commenced to dissolve in a blinding downpour of snowflakes.
The forest trees on either side of the line were speedily coated with a
heavy white mantle, the telegraph wires became thick glistening ropes,
the line itself was buried more and more completely under a carpeting of
snow, through which the not very powerful engine ploughed its way with
increasing difficulty. The Vienna-Fiume line is scarcely the best
equipped of the Austrian State railways, and Abbleway began to have
serious fears for a breakdown. The train had slowed down to a painful
and precarious crawl and presently came to a halt at a spot where the
drifting snow had accumulated in a formidable barrier. The engine made a
special effort and broke through the obstruction, but in the course of
another twenty minutes it was again held up. The process of breaking
through was renewed, and the train doggedly resumed its way, encountering
and surmounting fresh hindrances at frequent intervals. After a
standstill of unusually long duration in a particularly deep drift the
compartment in which Abbleway was sitting gave a huge jerk and a lurch,
and then seemed to remain stationary; it undoubtedly was not moving, and
yet he could hear the puffing of the engine and the slow rumbling and
jolting of wheels. The puffing and rumbling grew fainter, as though it
were dying away through the agency of intervening distance. Abbleway
suddenly gave vent to an exclamation of scandalised alarm, opened the
window, and peered out into the snowstorm. The flakes perched on his
eyelashes and blurred his vision, but he saw enough to help him to
realise what had happened. The engine had made a mighty plunge through
the drift and had gone merrily forward, lightened of the load of its rear
carriage, whose coupling had snapped under the strain. Abbleway was
alone, or almost alone, with a derelict railway waggon, in the heart of
some Styrian or Croatian forest. In the third-class compartment next to
his own he remembered to have seen a peasant woman, who had entered the
train at a small wayside station. "With the exception of that woman," he
exclaimed dramatically to himself, "the nearest living beings are
probably a pack of wolves."

Before making