nded to the day?

I arrived at my cousin's in the evening. It was freezing hard enough to
split the stones.

During dinner, in the large room whose side-boards, walls, and ceiling
were covered with stuffed birds, with wings extended or perched on
branches to which they were nailed,--hawks, herons, owls, nightjars,
buzzards, tiercels, vultures, falcons,--my cousin who, dressed in a
sealskin jacket, himself resembled some strange animal from a cold
country, told me what preparations he had made for that same night.

We were to start at half past three in the morning, so as to arrive at
the place which he had chosen for our watching-place at about half past
four. On that spot a hut had been built of lumps of ice, so as to
shelter us somewhat from the trying wind which precedes daybreak, a
wind so cold as to tear the flesh like a saw, cut it like the blade of
a knife, prick it like a poisoned sting, twist it like a pair of
pincers, and burn it like fire.

My cousin rubbed his hands: "I have never known such a frost," he said;
"it is already twelve degrees below zero at six o'clock in the evening."

I threw myself on to my bed immediately after we had finished our meal,
and went to sleep by the light of a bright fire burning in the grate.

At three o'clock he woke me. In my turn, I put on a sheepskin, and
found my cousin Karl covered with a bearskin. After having each
swallowed two cups of scalding coffee, followed by glasses of liqueur
brandy, we started, accompanied by a gamekeeper and our dogs, Plongeon
and Pierrot.

From the first moment that I got outside, I felt chilled to the very
marrow. It was one of those nights on which the earth seems dead with
cold. The frozen air becomes resisting and palpable, such pain does it
cause; no breath of wind moves it, it is fixed and motionless; it bites
you, pierces through you, dries you, kills the trees, the plants, the
insects, the small birds themselves, who fall from the branches on to
the hard ground, and become stiff themselves under the grip of the-cold.

The moon, which was in her last quarter and was inclining all to one
side, seemed fainting in the midst of space, so weak that she was
unable to wane, forced to stay up yonder, seized and paralyzed by the
severity of the weather. She shed a cold, mournful light over the
world, that dying and wan light which she gives us every month, at the
end of her period.

Karl and I walked side by side, our backs bent, our h