y
aforesaid; it was generally maintained that a club of young dare-devils
had raised the Fiend himself among them in the likeness of a black dog,
the night preceding the storm, and the young students actually did not
dare to show themselves at fairs or at markets for a year afterwards.

Snow-scenes less exciting, but more wild and dreary, may be found in
Alexander Henry's Travels with the Indians, in the last century. In the
winter of 1776, for instance, they wandered for many hundred miles over
the farthest northwestern prairies, where scarcely a white man had
before trodden. The snow lay from four to six feet deep. They went on
snow-shoes, drawing their stores on sleds. The mercury was sometimes
-32 deg.; no fire could keep them warm at night, and often they had no fire,
being scarcely able to find wood enough to melt the snow for drink. They
lay beneath buffalo-skins and the stripped bark of trees: a foot of snow
sometimes fell on them before morning. The sun rose at half past nine
and set at half past two. "The country was one uninterrupted plain, in
many parts of which no wood nor even the smallest shrub was to be seen:
a frozen, sea, of which the little coppices were the islands. That
behind which we had encamped the night before soon sank in the horizon,
and the eye had nothing left save only the sky and snow." Fancy them
encamped by night, seeking shelter in a scanty grove from a wild tempest
of snow; then suddenly charged upon by a herd of buffaloes, thronging in
from all sides of the wood to take shelter likewise,--the dogs barking,
the Indians firing, and still the bewildered beasts rushing madly
in, blinded by the storm, fearing the guns within less than the fury
without, crashing through the trees, trampling over the tents, and
falling about in the deep and dreary snow! No other writer has ever
given us the full desolation of Indian winter-life. Whole families,
Henry said, frequently perished together in such storms. No wonder that
the Aboriginal legends are full of "mighty Peboan, the Winter," and of
Kabibonokka a his lodge of snow-drifts.

The interest inspired by these simple narratives suggests the
reflection, that literature, which has thus far portrayed so few aspects
of external Nature, has described almost nothing of winter beauty.
In English books, especially, this season is simply forlorn and
disagreeable, dark and dismal.

"And foul and fierce
All winter drives along the darkened air."