s hand had been on it.

[Illustration: 370.jpg Open country]

Through the sparkling breadth of white, which seemed to glance my eyes
away, and outside the humps of laden trees, bowing their backs like a
woodman, I contrived to get along, half-sliding and half-walking, in
places where a plain-shodden man must have sunk, and waited freezing
till the thaw should come to him. For although there had been such
violent frost, every night, upon the snow, the snow itself, having never
thawed, even for an hour, had never coated over. Hence it was as soft
and light as if all had fallen yesterday. In places where no drift had
been, but rather off than on to them, three feet was the least of
depth; but where the wind had chased it round, or any draught led like a
funnel, or anything opposed it; there you might very safely say that
it ran up to twenty feet, or thirty, or even fifty, and I believe some
times a hundred.

At last I got to my spy-hill (as I had begun to call it), although I
never should have known it but for what it looked on. And even to
know this last again required all the eyes of love, soever sharp
and vigilant. For all the beautiful Glen Doone (shaped from out
the mountains, as if on purpose for the Doones, and looking in the
summer-time like a sharp cut vase of green) now was besnowed half up
the sides, and at either end so, that it was more like the white basins
wherein we boil plum-puddings. Not a patch of grass was there, not
a black branch of a tree; all was white; and the little river flowed
beneath an arch of snow; if it managed to flow at all.

Now this was a great surprise to me; not only because I believed Glen
Doone to be a place outside all frost, but also because I thought
perhaps that it was quite impossible to be cold near Lorna. And now it
struck me all at once that perhaps her ewer was frozen (as mine had been
for the last three weeks, requiring embers around it), and perhaps her
window would not shut, any more than mine would; and perhaps she wanted
blankets. This idea worked me up to such a chill of sympathy, that
seeing no Doones now about, and doubting if any guns would go off, in
this state of the weather, and knowing that no man could catch me up
(except with shoes like mine), I even resolved to slide the cliffs, and
bravely go to Lorna.

It helped me much in this resolve, that the snow came on again, thick
enough to blind a man who had not spent his time among it, as I had done
now for