would call "damp" rather than "moist"--the way you often feel
winter-winds along the shores of great lakes or along sea-coasts. There
was a cutting edge to it--it was "raw" And it had not been blowing very
long before low-hanging, dark, and formless cloud-masses began to scud
up from the north to the zenith. The northern lights, too, made their
appearance again about that time. They formed an arc very far to the
south, vaulting up behind my back, beyond the zenith. No streamers in
them, no filtered rays and streaks--nothing but a blurred luminosity
high above the clouds and--so it seemed--above the atmosphere. The
northern lights have moods, like the clouds--moods as varied as
theirs--though they do not display them so often nor quite so
ostentatiously.

We were nearing the bridge across the infant river. The road from the
south slopes down to this bridge in a rather sudden, s-shaped curve,
as perhaps the reader remembers. I still had the moonlight from time to
time, and whenever one of the clouds floated in front of the crescent,
I drove more slowly and more carefully. Now there is a peculiar thing
about moonlight on snow. With a fairly well-marked trail on bare ground,
in summertime, a very little of it will suffice to indicate the road,
for there are enough rough spots on the best of trails to cast little
shadows, and grass and weeds on both sides usually mark the beaten track
off still more clearly, even though the road lead north. But the snow
forms such an even expanse, and the trail on it is so featureless
that these signs are no longer available. The light itself also is too
characterless and too white and too nearly of the same quality as the
light reflected by the snow to allow of judging distances delicately and
accurately. You seem to see nothing but one vast whiteness all around.
When you drive east or west, the smooth edges of the tracks will cast
sharply defined shadows to the north, but when you drive north or south,
even these shadows are absent, and so you must entirely rely on your
horses to stay on the trail. I have often observed how easily my own
judgment was deluded.

But still I felt so absolutely sure that I should know when I approached
the bridge that, perhaps through overconfidence, I was caught napping.
There was another fact which I did not take sufficiently into account at
the time. I have mentioned that we had had a "soft spell." In fact, it
had been so warm for a day or two that the old