eezing temperature and clear
air that the North wind had spread around us, obscuring all the
sky in the dun clouds of conflict. The young moon threw her
clasped hands to a point of slender flame above her head and
drowned in it. Aunt Sue's snowbank had circled the horizon and was
rising steadily toward the zenith.

The sky does not give up its moisture readily this year, else the
snow prophets had had their way weeks ago. The morning after that
night on which the young moon drowned should have seen the air
whirling with white flakes, but only in mid-forenoon did the
clouds give up, and then grudgingly. All it had for us was a few
granules, first-form crystals consisting of the tiniest crossed
ice needles ground out of shape by the pressure between the
opposing forces of the air. In the woodland the eye caught a glint
of one of these now and then, but I had to go to the lee shore of
the pond to know that the storm was really beginning. There the
northeast wind, swept the ice for a half-mile, collected these
tiny snow nodules and sent them whirling along the smooth black
surface to bank them in miniature drifts against the southern
shore. They did not seem to come from the air, instead the ice
seemed to give them up under the pressure of the keen wind. It was
as if the edge of it scraped them off. The winding streams of them
were very like the spindrift I have seen swept in tortuous, level
flight from the black waves of the mid-Atlantic by a wild sea
gale. Very white they looked as they flew along the black ice, yet
when I picked a handful of them from the pond margin I saw that
they were anything but white. Instead they were dirty, in places
fairly black. The air had seemed crystal clear for weeks, yet the
snow had found in it the soot of a thousand factory chimneys and
brought it to earth.

The air seems full of a magical new life always after it has been
snowing for an hour or two. People who are out in it may have cold
feet and tingling ears and fingers, yet they feel the intoxication
of this renewed vitality till the very teamsters, half-frozen
though they may be, shout cheerily to one another and laugh with
the delight of it all. I fancy it is because the cleansing snow
has swept all the impurities out of it in its fall, and all
breathe its oxygen disentangled from soot and dust.

*****

An hour or two more and visible snowflakes were falling in
increasing numbers. The grind of winds in the upper air must hav