n the correction line appeared.

Strangely, school was still on in that yellow building at the corner. I
noticed a cutter outside, with a man in it, who apparently was waiting
for his children. This is the fourth of the pictures that stand out in
my memory. The man looked so forlorn. His horse, a big, hulking farm
beast, wore a blanket under the harness. I looked at my watch. It was
twenty-five minutes past four. Here, in the bush country where the
pioneers carve the farms out of the wilderness, the time kept is often
oddly at variance with the time of the towns. I looked back several
times, as long as I could see the building, which was for at least
another twenty minutes; but school did not close. Still the man sat
there, humped over, patiently waiting. It is this circumstance, I
believe, which fixed in my memory the exact hour at which I reached the
correction line.

Beyond, on the first mile of the last road east there was no possibility
of going fast. This piece was blown in badly. There was, however, always
a trail over this mile-long drift. The school, of course, had something
to do with that. But when you drive four feet above the ground, with
nothing but uncertain drifts on both sides of the trail, you want to be
chary of speeding your horses along. One wrong step, and a horse might
wallow in snow up to his belly, and you would lose more time than you
could make up for in an hour's breathless career. A horse is afraid,
too, of trotting there, and it takes a great deal of urging to make him
do it.

So we lost a little time here; but when a mile or so farther on we
reached the bush, we made up for it. This last run of five or six miles
along the correction line consisted of one single, soft, smooth bed of
snow. The trail was cut in sharply and never drifted. Every successive
snowfall was at once packed down by the tree-fellers, and whoever drove
along, could give his horses the lines. I did so, too, and the horses
ran.

I relaxed. I had done what I could do. Anxiety there was hardly any
now. A drive over more than forty miles, made at the greatest obtainable
speed, blunts your emotional energies. I thought of home, to be sure,
did so all the time; but it was with expectation now, with nothing else.
Within half an hour I should know...

Then the bush opened up. The last mile led along between snow-buried
meadows, school and house in plain view ahead. There lay the cottage, as
peaceful in the evening sun as a