had no thought of
leaving their food. Twice his arm twitched with involuntary impulse to
raise the stick and strike the nearest bird, and twice the impulse
failed him, till he dropped the stick.

The slight crust which usually forms on snow-banks had broken with the
weight of his figure as he leaned against it, and he lay full length
against the soft slope, enjoying rest upon so downy a couch, until the
birds forgot him, and then he put out his hand and grasped the nearest,
hardly more to its own surprise than to his. The bird feigned dead, as
frightened birds will, and when he was cheated into thinking it dead, it
got away, and it was only by a very quick movement that he caught it
again. He put it in a hanging pocket of his coat, and waited till he
could catch a companion to fill the opposite pocket.

Thus weighted, he continued his journey. It gave him the cheerful
feeling that a boy has when choice marbles are in his pocket. Neither
birds nor marbles under such circumstances have absolute use, but then
there is always the pleasant time ahead when it will be suitable to take
them out and look at them. The man did not finger his birds as a boy
might have done his marbles, but he did not forget them, and every now
and then he lifted the flaps of the, baggy pockets to refill them with
air.

He was tramping fast now down the trough of the little valley, under
trees that, though leafless, were thick enough to shut out the
surrounding landscape. The pencils of the evening sunlight, it is true,
found their way all over the rounded snow-ground, but the sunset was
hidden by the branches about him, and nothing but the snow and the tree
trunks was forced upon his eye, except now and then a bit of blue seen
through the branches--a blue that had lost much depth of colour with the
decline of day, and come nearer earth--a pale cold blue that showed
exquisite tenderness of contrast as seen through the dove-coloured grey
of maple boughs.

Where the valley dipped under water and the lake in the midst of the
hills had its shore, Trenholme came out from under the trees. The sun
had set. The plain of the ice and the snowclad hills looked blue with
cold--unutterably cold, and dead as lightless snow looks when the eye
has grown accustomed to see it animated with light. He could not see
where, beneath the snow, the land ended and the ice began; but it
mattered little. He walked out on the white plain scanning the
south-eastern hill-sl