gle
and piled on to my right side. A fair proportion of it reached my face
which soon became wet and then caked over with ice. There was a sting
to the flakes which made them rather disagreeable. My right eye kept
closing up, and I had to wipe it ever so often to keep it open. The
wind, too, for the first and only time on my drives, somehow found an
entrance into the lower part of the cutter box, and though my feet were
resting on the heater and my legs were wrapped, first in woollen and
then in leather leggings, besides being covered with a good fur robe, my
left side soon began to feel the cold. It may be that this comparative
discomfort, which I had to endure for the better part of the day,
somewhat coloured the kind of experience this drive became.

As far as the road was concerned, I had as yet little to complain of.
About three miles from the turn there stood a Lutheran church frequented
by the Russian Germans that formed a settlement for miles around. They
had made the trail for me on these three miles, and even for a matter of
four or five miles south of the church, as I found out. It is that kind
of a road which you want for long drives: where others who have short
drives and, therefore, do not need to consider their horses break the
crust of the snow and pack it down. I hoped that a goodly part of my
day's trip would be in the nature of a chain of shorter, much frequented
stretches; and on the whole I was not to be disappointed.

Doubtless all my readers know how a country road that is covered with
from two to three feet of snow will look when the trail is broken. There
is a smooth expanse, mostly somewhat hardened at the surface, and there
are two deep-cut tracks in it, each about ten to twelve inches wide,
sharply defined, with the snow at the bottom packed down by the horses'
feet and the runners of the respective conveyances. So long as you have
such a trail and horses with road sense, you do not need to worry about
your directions, no matter how badly it may blow. Horses that are used
to travelling in the snow will never leave the trail, for they dread
nothing so much as breaking in on the sides. This fact released my
attention for other things.

Now I thought again for a while of home, of how my wife would
be worrying, how even the little girl would be infected by her
nervousness--how she would ask, "Mamma, is Daddy in... now?" But I did
not care to follow up these thoughts too far. They made me feel t