the night
before, the stillness was disturbing. He sprang up and dressed
quickly--admonished by the coldness of his room--before hurrying to his
window to look out. When he tried the sash, it could not be raised. He
thrust his hand through the broken pane and tugged at the shutters;
they could not be shaken. Running downstairs to the kitchen and
returning with hot water, he melted away the ice embedding the bolts
and hinges.

A marvel of nature, terrible, beautiful, met his eyes: ice-rain and a
great frost Cloud, heavy still, but thinner than on the day before,
enwrapped the earth. The sun, descending through this translucent roof
of gray, filled the air beneath with a radiance as of molten pearl; and
in this under-atmosphere of pearl all earthly things were tipped and
hung in silver. Tree, bush, and shrub in the yard below, the rose
clambering the pillars of the porch under his window, the scant ivy
lower down on the house wall, the stiff little junipers, every blade of
grass--all encased in silver. The ruined cedars trailed from sparlike
tops their sweeping sails of incrusted emerald and silver. Along the
eaves, like a row of inverted spears of unequal lengths, hung the
argent icicles. No; not spun silver all this, but glass; all things
buried, not under a tide of liquid silver, but of flowing and then
cooling glass: Nature for once turned into a glass house, fixed in a
brittle mass, nowhere bending or swaying; but if handled roughly, sure
to be shivered.

The ground under every tree in the yard was strewn with boughs; what
must be the ruin of the woods whence the noises had reached him in the
night? Looking out of his window now, he could see enough to let him
understand the havoc, the wreckage.

He went at once to the stable for the feeding and found everything
strangely quiet--the stilling influence of a great frost on animal
life. There had been excitement and uneasiness enough during the night;
now ensued the reaction, for man is but one of the many animals with
nerves and moods. A catastrophe like this which covers with ice the
earth--grass, winter edible twig and leaf, roots and nuts for the brute
kind that turns the soil with the nose, such putting of all food
whatsoever out of reach of mouth or hoof or snout--brings these
creatures face to face with the possibility of starving: they know it
and are silent with apprehension of their peril; know it perhaps by the
survival of prehistoric memories reverberati