d with a bank of snow that blotted out the stone
wall and every vestige of the earth beneath. These hills wear this
belt till May, and sometimes the plow pauses beside them. From the
top of the ridge an immense landscape in immaculate white stretches
before us. Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and padded by the
stainless element, hang upon the sides of the mountains, or repose
across the long sloping hills. The fences or stone walls show like
half-obliterated black lines. I turn my back to the sun, or shade my
eyes with my hand. Every object or movement in the landscape is
sharply revealed; one could see a fox half a league. The farmer
foddering his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or leading his horse
to water; the pedestrian crossing the hill below; the children
wending their way toward the distant schoolhouse,--the eye cannot
help but note them: they are black specks upon square miles of
luminous white. What a multitude of sins this unstinted charity of
the snow covers! How it flatters the ground! Yonder sterile field
might be a garden, and you would never suspect that that gentle
slope with its pretty dimples and curves was not the smoothest of
meadows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone.

But what is that black speck creeping across that cleared field near
the top of the mountain at the head of the valley, three quarters
of a mile away? It is like a fly moving across an illuminated
surface. A distant mellow bay floats to us, and we know it is the
hound. He picked up the trail of the fox half an hour since, where
he had crossed the ridge early in the morning, and now he has routed
him and Reynard is steering for the Big Mountain. We press on and
attain the shoulder of the range, where we strike a trail two or
three days old of some former hunters, which leads us into the woods
along the side of the mountain. We are on the first plateau before
the summit; the snow partly supports us, but when it gives way and
we sound it with our legs, we find it up to our hips. Here we enter
a white world indeed. It is like some conjurer's trick. The very
trees have turned to snow. The smallest branch is like a cluster of
great white antlers. The eye is bewildered by the soft fleecy
labyrinth before it. On the lower ranges the forests were entirely
bare, but now we perceive the summit of every mountain about us runs
up into a kind of arctic region where the trees are loaded with
snow. The beginning of this colder zone is shar