ming along. But I am
anticipating just now In the bush I saw only their trails. Yet they
suggested their twittering and whistling even there; and since on the
gloomiest day their sound and their sight will cheer you, you surely
cannot help feeling glad and overflowing with joy when you see any sign
of them on a day like this!

Meanwhile we were winging along ourselves, so it seemed. For there was
the second east-west grade ahead. And that made me think of wife and
child to whom I was coming like Santa Claus, and so I stopped under
a bush that overhung the trail; and though I hated to destroy even a
trifling part of the beauty around, I reached high up with my whip and
let go at the branches, so that the moment before the horses bolted, the
flakes showered down upon me and my robes and the cutter and changed me
into a veritable snowman in snow white garb.

And then up on the grade. One mile to the east, and the bridge appeared.

It did not look like the work of man. Apart from its straight lines it
resembled more the architecture of a forest brook as it will build after
heavy fall rains followed by a late drought when all the waters of
the wild are receding so that the icy cover stands above them like the
arches of a bridge. It is strange how rarely the work of man will really
harmonize with Nature. The beaver builds, and his work will blend. Man
builds, and it jars--very likely because he mostly builds with silly
pretensions. But in winter Nature breathes upon his handiwork and
transforms it. Bridges may be imposing and of great artificial beauty in
cities--as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber
just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web
engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge--but if in the wilderness we
run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and
they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung
trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is
exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it
that they reconcile by their overweening boldness, by their very
paradoxality--as there is beauty even in the hawk's bloodthirsty
savagery. To-day this bridge was, like the grades, like the trees and
the meadows furred over with opalescent, feathery frost.

And the dam over which I am driving now! This dam that erstwhile was
a very blasphemy, an obscenity flung on the marshy meadows with their
reeds, their cat-t