.

It was a day of such glory as is only seen amid Northern snowfields.
Alec Trenholme looked up into the sky, and the blue of other skies that
he remembered faded beside it, as the blue of violets fades beside the
blue of gentian flowers. There was no cloud, no hint of vapour; the
sky, as one looked for it, was not there, but it was as if the sight
leaped through the sunlit ether, so clear it was, and saw the dark blue
gulfs of space that were beyond the reach of the sun's lighting. The
earth was not beyond the reach of the sunlight, and in all that wide
white land, in mile after mile of fields, of softened hillock and buried
hollow, there was not a frozen crystal that did not thrill to its centre
with the sunlight and throw it back in a soft glow of myriad rays.

Trenholme retraced his steps on the road from Turrif's door to a point
nearer his old railway-station; then he put on his snow-shoes and set
out for the gap in the hills that led to the Bates and Cameron clearing.
As he mounted the soft snow that was heaped by the roadside and struck
out across the fields, his heart bounded with a sense of power and
freedom, such as a man might have who found means to walk upon the
ocean. Little need had he of map or guide to mark the turning or
crossing of his road; the gap in the hills was clear to his eyes fifteen
miles away; the world was white, and he strode across it. When the earth
is made up of pearl-dust and sunshine, and the air is pure as the air of
heaven, the heart of man loses all sense of effort, and action is as
spontaneous as breath itself. Trenholme was half-way to the hills before
he felt that he had begun his day's journey.

When he got past the unbroken snow of the farm lands and the blueberry
flats, the white surface was broken by the tops of brushwood. He did not
take the line of the straight corduroy road; it was more free and
exciting to make a meandering track wherever the snow lay sheer over a
chain of frozen pools that intersected the thickets. There was no
perceptible heat in the rays the sun poured down, but the light was so
great that where the delicate skeletons of the young trees were massed
together it was a relief to let the eye rest upon them.

That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful
deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey
there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green
of spruce firs that grew up elsewher