h of the little cabin,
thinking the spot always accessible; but he had builded in ignorance.

The snow first commenced falling in the afternoon. By the next morning
the tiny house was buried to the window sashes. Looking out, there
could be seen but an indistinct slanting white wall, scarcely ten feet
away: a screen through which the sunlight filtered dimly, like the
solemn haze of a church. The earth was not silent, now. The falling of
the sleet and snow was as the striking of fine shot, and the sound of
the wind a steady unceasing moan, resembling the sigh of a big dynamo
at a distance.

Slowly, inch by inch, during that day the snow crept up the window
panes until, before the coming of darkness without, it fell within.
Banked though they were on three sides, on the fourth side,
unprotected, the cold penetrated bitterly,--a cold no living thing
could withstand without shelter. Then it was that Ichabod and Camilla
feared to sleep, and that the long vigil began.

By the next morning there was no light from the windows. The snow had
drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window
frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a
pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the
dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood
revealed a slanting drab wall,--a condensed milky way.

The storm was yet on, and he closed the window. To get outside for
fuel that day was impossible, so with an axe Ichabod chopped a hole
through the wall into the big pile, and on wood thus secured sawed
steadily in the tiny kitchen, while the kerosene lamp at his side
sputtered, and the fire crackled in a silence, like that surrounding a
hunted animal in its den.

Many usual events had occurred in the lives of the wandering Ichabod
and Camilla, which had been forgotten; but the memory of that day, the
overwhelming, incontestible knowledge of the impotency of wee,
restless, inconsequent man, they were never to forget.

"Tiny, tiny, mortal!" laughed the storm. "To think you would combat
Nature, would defy her, the power of which I am but one of many, many
manifestations!" And it laughed again. The two prisoners, listening,
their ears to the tunnel, heard the sound, and felt to the full its
biting mockery.

Next day the siege was raised, and the sun smiled as only the sun can
smile upon miles and miles of dazzling snow crystals. Ichabod climbed
out--by way of the wind