stretch of woods I
tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost my bearings, stumbled into
a ditch, and for a moment got utterly confused with the black of the
night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering hand of the wind on my
mouth.

Then I sat down where I was to pull myself together. There might be
danger in such a situation, but I was not really cold--not cool enough.
I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, by a frontal attack
instead of on the enemy's flank.

Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full force of the sweeping
gale, and here I realized for the first time that this was the great
storm of the winter, one of the supreme passages of the year, and one
of the glorious physical fights of a lifetime.

On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast,
frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end. What must the
wild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scott
and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very
poles! Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination!
The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose! A living
atom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world! A human
mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmost
shore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God can
follow!

It is not what a man does, but what he lives through doing it. Life
may be safer, easier, longer, and fuller of possessions in one place
than another. But possessions do not measure life, nor years, nor
ease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham hills in winter is wretchedly
remote at times, but nothing happens to me all day long in Boston to be
compared for a moment with this experience here in the night and snow.
I never feel the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness of the
world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the fearful majesty of such a
winter storm.

As the far-flung lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the
drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that
primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung
myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night
and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged
myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice of the storm a
mighty song within my soul.

This happened, as I say, _once_ last winter, and of course she said w