ck of satisfaction, to the wholesome gravel by the stable-door.

By-and-by the snow-flakes pile more leisurely: they grow large and
scattered, and come more slowly than before. The hills, that were brown,
heave into sight--great, rounded billows of white. The gray woods look
shrunken to half their height, and stand waving in the storm. The wind
freshens, and scatters the light flakes that crown the burden of the
snow; and as the day droops, a clear, bright sky of steel color cleaves
the land and clouds, and sends down a chilling wind to bank the walls
and to freeze the storm. The moon rises full and round, and plays with a
joyous chill over the glistening raiment of the land.

I pile my fire with the clean-cleft hickory; and musing over some sweet
story of the olden time, I wander into a rich realm of thought, until my
eyes grow dim, and dreaming of battle and of prince, I fall to sleep in
my old farm-chamber.

At morning I find my dreams all written on the window in crystals of
fairy shape. The cattle, one by one, with ears frost-tipped, and with
frosted noses, wend their way to the watering-place in the meadow. One
by one they drink, and crop at the stunted herbage which the warm spring
keeps green and bare.

A hound bays in the distance; the smoke of cottages rises straight
toward heaven; a lazy jingle of sleigh-bells wakens the quiet of the
high-road; and upon the hills the leafless woods stand low, like
crouching armies, with guns and spears in rest; and among them the
scattered spiral pines rise like bannermen, uttering with their thousand
tongues of green the proud war-cry--"God is with us!"

But the sky of winter is as capricious as the sky of spring, even as the
old wander in thought, like the vagaries of a boy.

Before noon the heavens are mantled with a leaden gray; the eaves, that
leaked in the glow of the sun, now tell their tale of morning's warmth
in crystal ranks of icicles. The cattle seek their shelter; the few
lingering leaves of the white-oaks rustle dismally; the pines breathe
sighs of mourning. As the night darkens, and deepens the storm, the
house-dog bays; the children crouch in the wide chimney-corners; the
sleety rain comes in sharp gusts. And as I sit by the light leaping
blaze in my chamber, the scattered hail-drops beat upon my window, like
the tappings of an OLD MAN'S cane.

I.

_What is Gone._

Gone! Did it ever strike you, my reader, how much meaning lies in that
little