pocket compass? You'd be
liable to kiss her before you collected your presence of mind."

By and by, the flood of Ross's talk was drawn up into the clouds (so it
pleased me to fancy) and there condensed into the finer snowflakes of
thought; and we sat silent about the stove, as good friends and bitter
enemies will do. I thought of Boss's preamble about the mysterious
influence upon man exerted by that ermine-lined monster that now
covered our little world, and knew he was right.

Of all the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts,
rat-traps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us
from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the
snow. By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity--so, at
the beginning we look doubtfully at chemistry.

It falls upon the world, and lo! we live in another. It hides in a
night the old scars and familiar places with which we have grown
heart-sick or enamored. So, as quietly as we can, we hustle on our
embroidered robes and hie us on Prince Camaralzaman's horse or in the
reindeer sleigh into the white country where the seven colors converge.
This is when our fancy can overcome the bane of it.

But in certain spots of the earth comes the snow-madness, made known by
people turned wild and distracted by the bewildering veil that has
obscured the only world they know. In the cities, the white fairy who
sets the brains of her dupes whirling by a wave of her wand is cast for
the comedy role. Her diamond shoe buckles glitter like frost; with a
pirouette she invites the spotless carnival.

But in the waste places the snow is sardonic. Sponging out the world
of the outliers, it gives no foothold on another sphere in return. It
makes of the earth a firmament under foot; it leaves us clawing and
stumbling in space in an inimical fifth element whose evil outdoes its
strangeness and beauty, There Nature, low comedienne, plays her tricks
on man. Though she has put him forth as her highest product, it
appears that she has fashioned him with what seems almost incredible
carelessness and indexterity. One-sided and without balance, with his
two halves unequally fashioned and joined, must he ever jog his
eccentric way. The snow falls, the darkness caps it, and the
ridiculous man-biped strays in accurate circles until he succumbs in
the ruins of his defective architecture.

In the throat of the thirsty the snow is vitriol. In ap