ood in the village for
them, how was it to be brought to them through the drifted snow?

She eagerly watched the window for some sign that the storm was abating.
The snow that had seemed so beautiful at first filled her with a vague
fear now; it no longer fell softly and silently; the wind bore it by in
whirling masses, that hid the river and the pond and the changing sky,
and then laid it down in the valleys and on the hill-sides, to lie
there, Sophy knew, till April showers and sunshine should come to melt
it away. It was vain to look for any one coming with the expected food.
Except now and then in a momentary lull of the storm it was quite
impossible to see a rod beyond the window, and these glimpses only
served to show that they were, on one side at least, quite shut in by a
mountainous drift.

Yes, Sophy began to be quite afraid of the snow; tales that she had
heard during her summer visits to the mountains came to her mind--how in
a single night the valleys would be filled, and how whole flocks of
sheep, and sometimes an unwary shepherd, had perished beneath it. She
remembered how her grandfather had showed her a cottage where a mother
and her children had been quite shut in for two nights and a day, till
the neighbours had come to dig them out; and how a lad who had gone out
for help before the storm was over had never come home again, but
perished on the moor, and how they only found him in the spring time,
when the snow melted and showed his dead face turned towards the sky.
These things quite appalled her when she thought of venturing out in the
storm.

The little store of meal held out wonderfully; the bread was put aside
for her mother--hidden, indeed, that no little brother, hungry and
adventurous, might find it. That night the storm abated, but towards
morning it grew bitterly cold, so cold that the little lads in their
thin garments could not venture out to play at making roads in the snow,
and they had to submit to another day's confinement. They went out a
little towards afternoon, and came in again merry and hungry, and by no
means satisfied with the scanty supper which their sister had prepared
for them.

CHAPTER THREE.

HOME TRIALS.

We could never tell you all that the poor mother suffered as she lay
there day after day helpless among her children. Her own illness and
helplessness was the last drop, which made her cup overflow. Gradually,
as she lay there listening to the roaring