It was a season unusually cold for Devonshire, when, with
a merry party of boys and girls, I sallied forth to see how nature
looked decked in her robe of virgin white. Hill and valley were one
sheet of 'innocent snow;' and every twig, leaf, and blade of grass;
every spray of the furze and heath; and every broad, drooping leaf of
that beautiful fern the hart's tongue (_Scolopendrium vulgare_), was
coated with hoar-frost, and sparkling in the rosy sunbeams like the
flowers in a magic garden. At Sherbrook Lake, where a rivulet of clear
water usually flows along the bottom of the ravine down to the sea,
there was now a hard mass of ice, on which our boys rushed for a passing
slide; and above, where the deeper water lies under the shadow of the
brushwood, the frost had been busy performing its frolic feats--

'And see where it has hung th' embroidered banks
With forms so various that no powers of art,
The pencil, or the pen, may trace the scene!
Here glittering turrets rise, upbearing high
(Fantastic misarrangement!) on the roof
Large growth of what may seem the sparkling trees
And shrubs of fairyland. The crystal drops,
That trickle down the branches, fast congealed,
Shoot into pillars of pellucid length,
And prop the pile they but adorned before.
Here grotto within grotto safe defies
The sunbeam; there, embossed and fretted wild,
The growing wonder takes a thousand shapes
Capricious, in which fancy seeks in vain
The likeness of some object seen before.'

From the beautiful beacon cliff--to which we eagerly toil through the
snow, and up and down the slippery hill-sides--we behold the sea as
still and smiling as in summer, and as clearly reflecting the exquisite
blue of the vault above; but each of the many little rills which the
long rains preceding the frost had caused to flow over the face of the
red cliffs, is now a stationary thread of silver, spell-bound by the
enchaining frost; and icicles, or, as old-fashioned people call them,
_aglets_, of three or four feet long, ornament the overhanging ledges,
prone to fall to the beach--far, far below--when a thaw releases them
from their present stations. But the air is so very keen that nothing
but the briskness of our walk, and the enlivenment of an occasional
spell of snow-balling, in which the seniors are tempted to join the
juniors, prevent our stagnating into 'pellucid pillars' ourselves. So
much, then, for