e heart as I marked the strained, anxious look on each
face, a look that asked what strange thing had come upon us. They had
been there, they said, for some time. Ella, Jim, and Bill, who slept
alone, had been the first to leave their beds. Then father and mother,
and finally my wife and I, had followed. Soon after our arrival there
was a fumbling at the door, and the two Irish girls, who help mother
keep house, put in their blue, pinched faces. They scarcely waited an
invitation to come up to the register.

The room was but dimly lighted, for the gas, affected by the fearful
chill, was flowing slowly and threatened to go out. The gloom added to
the depressing effect of our strange situation. Little was said. The
actual occurrence of strange and unheard-of events excites very much
less wonderment than the account of them written or rehearsed. Indeed,
the feeling of surprise often seems wholly left out of the mental
experience of those who undergo or behold the most prodigious
catastrophes. The sensibility to the marvelous is the one of our
faculties which is, perhaps, the soonest exhausted by a strain. Human
nature takes naturally to miracles, after all. "What can it mean?" was
the inquiry a dozen times on the lips of each one of us, but beyond
that, I recall little that was said. Bill, who was the joker of the
family, had essayed a jest or two at first on our strange predicament,
but they had been poorly received. The discomfort was too serious,
and the extraordinary nature of the visitation filled every mind with
nameless forebodings and a great, unformed fear.

We asked each other if our neighbors were all in the same plight with
ourselves. They must be, of course, and many of them far less prepared
to meet it. There might be whole families in the last extremity of cold
right about us. I went to the window, and with my knife scraped away
the rime of frost, an eighth of an inch thick, which obscured it, till
I could see out. A whitish-gray light was on the landscape. Every object
seemed still, with a quite peculiar stillness that might be called
intense. From the chimneys of some of the houses around thick columns of
smoke and sparks were pouring, showing that the fires were being crowded
below. Other chimneys showed no smoke at all. Here and there a dull
light shone from a window. There was no other sign of life anywhere. The
streets were absolutely empty. No one suggested trying to communicate
with other houses. Th