tables (mustered all together for the sake of breath and
steaming) had long icicles from their muzzles, almost every morning.
But of all things the very gravest, to my apprehension, was the
impossibility of hearing, or having any token of or from my loved one.
Not that those three days alone of snow (tremendous as it was) could
have blocked the country so; but that the sky had never ceased, for more
than two days at a time, for full three weeks thereafter, to pour fresh
piles of fleecy mantle; neither had the wind relaxed a single day from
shaking them. As a rule, it snowed all day, cleared up at night, and
froze intensely, with the stars as bright as jewels, earth spread out in
lustrous twilight, and the sounds in the air as sharp and crackling as
artillery; then in the morning, snow again; before the sun could come to
help.

It mattered not what way the wind was. Often and often the vanes went
round, and we hoped for change of weather; the only change was that it
seemed (if possible) to grow colder. Indeed, after a week or so, the
wind would regularly box the compass (as the sailors call it) in the
course of every day, following where the sun should be, as if to make
a mock of him. And this of course immensely added to the peril of the
drifts; because they shifted every day; and no skill or care might learn
them.

I believe it was on Epiphany morning, or somewhere about that period,
when Lizzie ran into the kitchen to me, where I was thawing my
goose-grease, with the dogs among the ashes--the live dogs, I mean, not
the iron ones, for them we had given up long ago,--and having caught
me, by way of wonder (for generally I was out shoveling long before my
"young lady" had her nightcap off), she positively kissed me, for the
sake of warming her lips perhaps, or because she had something proud to
say.

"You great fool, John," said my lady, as Annie and I used to call her,
on account of her airs and graces; "what a pity you never read, John!"

"Much use, I should think, in reading!" I answered, though pleased with
her condescension; "read, I suppose, with roof coming in, and only this
chimney left sticking out of the snow!"

"The very time to read, John," said Lizzie, looking grander; "our worst
troubles are the need, whence knowledge can deliver us."

"Amen," I cried out; "are you parson or clerk? Whichever you are,
good-morning."

Thereupon I was bent on my usual round (a very small one nowadays), but
Eliza took