evening were absolutely unannounced; they entered upon the sleety
stage for whose violent acts I held no program.

One afternoon I was to go to one of my appointments, a mining town in
Utah. In order to relieve home cares I took with me my four-year-old
son, who thus would get some novel entertainment as well. To the buggy
I hitched Jenny, the strawberry-roan cayuse, and started for the
distant point. It was a little stormy all the way, and by the time we
had well begun the service it had thickened so that a hard snow was
setting in. It was dead in the north and continued with such strength
that soon there appeared no slant to the falling columns. By the time
church was dismissed the blizzard was on in full force, and the roads
were already so filled with the new drifts that to return with the
buggy was hardly thinkable. I borrowed a saddle, and leaving the
little lad with friends, started for home, where I was under
appointment to preach that evening. My way lay in the north, in the
very teeth of the raging storm. With head tucked down, I trusted the
reins to Jenny, who had never disappointed me in many a mountain trip,
but I had not gone far until I found the storm was at my back. Peering
sharply through the fast falling darkness, I discovered that the
mountains were on my left instead of on my right, as they should have
been. Jenny had turned tail to the storm. Feeling herself unwilling to
face the arctic onset, she was retreating.

Only the dire necessity of the occasion made me compel her to face the
torturing attack of the icy shafts that were hurling themselves on us
like steel points.

We were forced, Jenny and I, to abandon the only road, now drift-filled,
and take an unbroken way through the sagebrush, junipers, buckbrush,
and other tangled chaparral, where there was no trail at all, and
farther to the right, that I might keep an eye on the mountains and not
get turned around again. I felt the force of Cardinal Newman's
immortal hymn,

... amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!

We had not gone far until I began to hear the sweetest music. I could
not imagine from whence it fell, as I knew there was not a human home
in all that plain between the two settlements. Then I heard personal
conversation; in fact, the night was full of pleasant travelers. The
awful storm seemed not to af