g edges of the roofs, where you may see them clustering
in long deep lines like black cornices.

At home we associate snow with darkness and gloom; but, when once
the snow has fallen, the sky of Moscow is as bright and as blue as
that of Italy; the atmosphere is clear and pure; the sun shines for
several hours in the day with a brightness from which the reflection
of the snow becomes perfectly dazzling; and if the frost be intense,
there is not a breath of wind. The breath that really does attract
your notice is that of the pedestrians, who appear to be blowing
forth columns of smoke or steam into the rarefied atmosphere, and
who look like so many walking chimneys or human locomotives. And
if breath looks like smoke, smoke itself looks almost solid. Rise
early, when the fires are being lighted which are to heat the stoves
through the entire day, and if the thermometer outside your window
marks more than 15 deg., you will see the grey columns rising heavily into
the air, until at a certain height the smoke remains stationary, and
hangs in clouds above the houses. Looking from some great elevation,
such as the tower of Ivan Veliki in the Kremlin, you see these
clouds beneath you, agitated like waves, and forming a kind of
nebulous sea, which is, however, soon taken up by the surrounding
atmosphere.

It is astonishing how much cold one can support when the sky is
bright and the sun shining; certainly ten or fifteen degrees more
by Reaumur's thermometer, than when the day is dark and gloomy.
And the effect is the same on all. On one of these fine frosty
days there is unwonted cheerfulness in the look, unwonted energy
in the movements of everyone you meet. If there were the slightest
wind with so keen a temperature, you would feel, every time it grazed
your face, as if you were being shaved with a blunt razor,--for to
be cut with a sharp one is comparatively nothing. But the air is
calm; and as the day exhilarates you generally, it makes you walk
more briskly than you are in the habit of doing in your _shouba_
of cloth, wadding, and fur; and the result is, you are so warm and
so surrounded by sunshine, that, but for seeing the cold, you might
fancy yourself on the shores of the Mediterranean instead of on the
banks of the Moskva, which is now a long, shiny, serpent-like path
of ice. In London, on a damp, foggy, sunless winter's day, when
the thermometer is not quite down to freezing-point, the system
is so depressed by th