enemy to beauty. My poor wife and Ella, with their
pinched faces, strained, aching expression, red, rheumy eyes and noses,
and blue or pallid cheeks were sad parodies on their comely selves.
Other forces of nature have in them something the spirit of man can
sympathize with, as the wind, the waves, the sun; but there is something
terribly inhuman about the cold. I can imagine it as a congenial
principle brooding over the face of chaos in the aeons before light was.

Hours had passed, it might have been years, when father said, "Let us
pray." He knelt down, and we all mechanically followed his example, as
from childhood up we had done at morning and evening. Ever before, the
act had seemed merely a fit and graceful ceremony, from which no one had
expected anything in particular to follow, or had experienced aught save
the placid reaction that commonly results from a devotional act. But
now the meaning so long latent became eloquent. The morning and evening
ceremony became the sole resource in an imminent and fearful emergency.
There was a familiar strangeness about the act under these circumstances
which touched us all. With me, as with most, something of the feeling
implied in the adage, "Familiarity breeds contempt," had impaired my
faith in the practical efficacy of prayer. How could extraordinary
results be expected from so common an instrumentality, and especially
from so ordinary and every-day a thing as family prayer? Our faith in
the present instance was also not a little lessened by the peculiar
nature of the visitation. In any ordinary emergency God might help us,
but we had a sort of dim apprehension that even He could not do anything
in such weather. So far as humbleness was concerned, there was no
lack of that. There are some inflictions which, although terrible, are
capable of stirring in haughty human hearts a rebellious indignation.
But to cold succumb soul and mind. It has always seemed to me that cold
would have broken down Milton's Satan. I felt as if I could grovel to be
vouchsafed a moment's immunity from the gripe of the savage frost.

Owing to the sustaining power there is in habit, the participation in
family devotions proved strengthening to us all. In emergencies, we get
back from our habits the mental and moral vigor that first went to their
formation, and has since remained on interest.

It is not the weakest who succumb first to cold, as was strikingly
proved in our experience. The prostrati