r, the horses
were every second ready to bolt. Peter snorted and danced, Dan laid his
ears back on his head. But the boy gave warning at every open hole, and
we made it safely. At last we got back to the road, I kept talking and
purring to the horses for a while, and it seemed they were quieting
down.

It was not an auspicious beginning for a long night-drive. And though
for a while all things seemed to be going about as well as I could
wish, there remained a nervousness which, slight though it seemed while
unprovoked, yet tinged every motion of the horses and even my own state
of mind. Still, while we were going west, and later, north into the
one-third-way town, the drive was one of the most marvellously beautiful
ones that I had had during that winter of marvellous sights.

As I have mentioned, the moon was in its first quarter and, therefore,
during the early part of the night high in the sky. It was not very
cold; the lower air was quiet, of that strange, hushed stillness
which in southern countries is the stillness of the noon hour in
midsummer--when Pan is frightened into a panic by the very quiet. It was
not so, however, in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It was a night
of skies, of shifting, ever changing skies. Not for five minutes did an
aspect last. When I looked up, after maybe having devoted my attention
for a while to a turn in the road or to a drift, there was no trace left
of the picture which I had seen last. And you could not help it, the
sky would draw your eye. There was commotion up there--operations were
proceeding on a very vast scale, but so silently, with not a whisper of
wind, that I felt hushed myself.

A few of the aspects have persisted in my memory, but it seems an
impossible task to sketch them.

I was driving along through open fields. The trail led dimly ahead. Huge
masses of snow with sharp, immovable shadows flanked it. The horses were
very wide awake. They cocked their ears at every one of the mounds; and
sometimes they pressed rump against rump, as if to reassure each other
by their mutual touch.

About halfway up from the northern horizon there lay a belt of faintest
luminosity in the atmosphere--no play of northern lights--just an
impalpable paling of the dark blue sky. There were stars, too, but
they were not very brilliant. Way down in the north, at the edge of
the world, there lay a long, low-flung line of cloud, black, scarcely
discernible in the light of the moon.