e meet a stage-coach on the narrow
road we simply drive our horse up the hillside and lift the buckboard
out of the way. Very soon, however, we shall exchange it for a
sleigh."

It was a long, bitter winter spent amid the ice and snow, the
thermometer at one time showing 48 degrees below zero. By November 19
it was fiercely cold, and water and ink froze in the rooms with fires
going all day and night. When the kitchen floor was washed with warm
water, even with a hot fire burning in the room, the floor became a
sheet of ice. All food had to be thawed out before it could be eaten,
and the thawing-out process sometimes presented great difficulties, a
haunch of venison remaining full of ice after being in a hot oven for
an hour. Sometimes a lump of ice was left unmelted in the centre of
the soup-pot even when the water boiled all around it. The cold was
most intense at night, when the rivets could be heard starting from
the boards like pistol-shots, but during the day the temperature was
often quite mild. The snow was so deep that it reached the
second-story windows, and paths had to be shovelled out and kept clear
around the house. In the streets a snow-plough was used. By March the
Hunter's Home was nearly buried in the drifts, and in spite of a huge
open fireplace, in which great log fires were kept constantly burning,
and a stove in every room, it was impossible to do much more than
barely keep from freezing to death. When they went out, muffled up to
the ears in furs, they carried little slabs of hot soapstone in their
pockets, for it was a great comfort to thrust a frozen hand into a
toasting-hot pocket.

Added to the bitterness of the cold was the depression of grey,
sunless days, only too like their memories of Scotland, and while they
sat and shivered around their immense fireplace their thoughts turned
insistently towards sunnier lands. Many years before, when Mr.
Stevenson was a mere lad, it had been suggested that the South Seas
was the very place for him, and the plan for a voyage there some time
in the future had always lain dormant in his thoughts, waiting for the
opportunity. This old dream now came to mind again, and every glance
from their frost-covered windows at the bleak dreariness without made
their vision of tropical forests and coral strands seem the more
alluring. The project now began to take on definite shape, and days
were spent in poring over Findlay's directories of the Mediterranean,
the I