e. Intense light has the effect of
lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the
fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in
comparison with the blue beyond.

This was while he was in the open plain; but when he walked into the
forest, passing into the gap in the hills, all was changed. The snow,
lightly shadowed by the branches overhead, was more quiet to the sight,
and where his path lay near fir trees, the snow, where fell their heavy
shade, looked so dead and cold and grey that it recalled thoughts of
night-time, or of storm, or of other gloomy things; and this thought of
gloom, which the dense shadow brought, had fascination, because it was
such a wondrous contrast to the rest of the happy valley, in which the
sunbeams, now aslant, were giving a golden tinge to the icy facets of
crags, to high-perched circling drifts, to the basin of unbroken snow,
to the brown of maple trunks, and to the rich verdure of the very firs
which cast the shadow.

It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when he stopped his steady
tramp, arrested by the sight of the first living things he had seen--a
flock of birds upon a wild vine that, half snow-covered, hung out the
remnant of its frozen berries in a cleft of the hill. The birds did not
fly at his approach, and, going nearer and nearer on the silent snow, he
at last stopped, taking in greedily the sight of their pretty,
fluttering, life. They were rather large birds, large as the missel
thrush; they had thick curved beaks and were somewhat heavy in form; but
the plumage of the males was like the rose-tint of dawn or evening when
it falls lightly upon some grey cloud. They uttered no note, but, busy
with their feast, fluttered and hopped with soft sound of wings.

In lieu of gun or net, Trenholme broke a branch from a tree beside him,
and climbed nearer to the birds in order to strike one down if
possible. To his surprise, as he advanced deftly with the weapon, the
little creatures only looked at him with bright-eyed interest, and made
no attempt to save themselves. The conviction forced itself upon him
with a certain awe that these birds had never seen a man before. His arm
dropped beside him; something of that feeling which comes to the
explorer when he thinks that he sets his foot where man has never trod
came to him now as he leaned against the snow-bank. The birds, it is
true, had fluttered beyond his arm's length, but they