he muttered. "Filthy fool! Mucking with snow like
a beastly baby! When will they be civilized? Why, the very state of the
street is a disgrace and a temptation to such tomfools. Why isn't all
this snow cleared away and the street made decent?"

To the eye of efficiency, there was, indeed, something to complain of
in the condition of the road. Snow was banked up on both sides in white
walls and towards the other and darker end of the street even rose into
a chaos of low colourless hills. By the time he reached them he was
nearly knee deep, and was in a far from philanthropic frame of mind.
The solitude of the little streets was as strange as their white
obstruction, and before he had ploughed his way much further he was
convinced that he had taken a wrong turning, and fallen upon some
formless suburb unvisited before. There was no light in any of the low,
dark houses; no light in anything but the blank emphatic snow. He was
modern and morbid; hellish isolation hit and held him suddenly; anything
human would have relieved the strain, if it had been only the leap of a
garotter. Then the tender human touch came indeed; for another snowball
struck him, and made a star on his back. He turned with fierce joy, and
ran after a boy escaping; ran with dizzy and violent speed, he knew not
for how long. He wanted the boy; he did not know whether he loved or
hated him. He wanted humanity; he did not know whether he loved or hated
it.

As he ran he realized that the landscape around him was changing in
shape though not in colour. The houses seemed to dwindle and disappear
in hills of snow as if buried; the snow seemed to rise in tattered
outlines of crag and cliff and crest, but he thought nothing of all
these impossibilities until the boy turned to bay. When he did he saw
the child was queerly beautiful, with gold red hair, and a face as
serious as complete happiness. And when he spoke to the boy his own
question surprised him, for he said for the first time in his life,
"What am I doing here?" And the little boy, with very grave eyes,
answered, "I suppose you are dead."

He had (also for the first time) a doubt of his spiritual destiny. He
looked round on a towering landscape of frozen peaks and plains, and
said, "Is this hell?" And as the child stared, but did not answer, he
knew it was heaven.

All over that colossal country, white as the world round the Pole,
little boys were playing, rolling each other down dreadful slopes,