e remainder
of the long pallid day he sat beside the fire with gloomy face. Even his
indomitable spirit was awed by the fury of that storm.

So long and so continuously did those immitigable winds howl in our ears
that their tumult persisted, in imagination, when on the third morning,
we thawed holes in the thickened rime of the window panes and looked
forth on a world silent as a marble sea and flaming with sunlight. My
own relief was mingled with surprise--surprise to find the landscape so
unchanged.

True, the yard was piled high with drifts and the barns were almost lost
to view but the far fields and the dark lines of Burr Oak Grove remained
unchanged.

We met our school-mates that day, like survivors of shipwreck, and for
many days we listened to gruesome stories of disaster, tales of stages
frozen deep in snow with all their passengers sitting in their seats,
and of herders with their silent flocks around them, lying stark as
granite among the hazel bushes in which they had sought shelter. It was
long before we shook off the awe with which this tempest filled our
hearts.

The school-house which stood at the corner of our new farm was less than
half a mile away, and yet on many of the winter days which followed, we
found it quite far enough. Hattie was now thirteen, Frank nine and I a
little past eleven but nothing, except a blizzard such as I have
described, could keep us away from school. Facing the cutting wind,
wallowing through the drifts, battling like small intrepid animals, we
often arrived at the door moaning with pain yet unsubdued, our ears
frosted, our toes numb in our boots, to meet others in similar case
around the roaring hot stove.

Often after we reached the school-house another form of suffering
overtook us in the "thawing out" process. Our fingers and toes, swollen
with blood, ached and itched, and our ears burned. Nearly all of us
carried sloughing ears and scaling noses. Some of the pupils came two
miles against these winds.

The natural result of all this exposure was of course, chilblains! Every
foot in the school was more or less touched with this disease to which
our elders alluded as if it were an amusing trifle, but to us it was no
joke.

After getting thoroughly warmed up, along about the middle of the
forenoon, there came into our feet a most intense itching and burning
and aching, a sensation so acute that keeping still was impossible, and
all over the room an uneasy shuffli