loiteringly it came, and how microscopic its
first siftings!

This mill is bolting its flour very fine, you think. But wait a
little; it gets coarser by and by; you begin to see the flakes; they
increase in numbers and in size, and before one o'clock it is snowing
steadily. The flakes come straight down, but in a half hour they have
a marked slant toward the north; the wind is taking a hand in the
game. By mid-afternoon the storm is coming in regular pulse-beats or
in vertical waves. The wind is not strong, but seems steady; the
pines hum, yet there is a sort of rhythmic throb in the meteor; the
air toward the wind looks ribbed with steady-moving vertical waves of
snow. The impulses travel along like undulations in a vast suspended
white curtain, imparted by some invisible hand there in the northeast.
As the day declines the storm waxes, the wind increases, the snow-fall
thickens, and

"the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, inclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm,"

a privacy which you feel outside as well as in. Out-of-doors you seem
in a vast tent of snow; the distance is shut out, near-by objects are
hidden; there are white curtains above you and white screens about
you, and you feel housed and secluded in storm. Your friend leaves
your door, and he is wrapped away in white obscurity, caught up in a
cloud, and his footsteps are obliterated. Travelers meet on the road,
and do not see or hear each other till they are face to face. The
passing train, half a mile away, gives forth a mere wraith of sound.
Its whistle is deadened as in a dense wood.

Still the storm rose. At five o'clock I went forth to face it in a
two-mile walk. It was exhilarating in the extreme. The snow was
lighter than chaff. It had been dried in the Arctic ovens to the last
degree. The foot sped through it without hindrance. I fancied the
grouse and the quail quietly sitting down in the open places, and
letting it drift over them. With head under wing, and wing snugly
folded, they would be softly and tenderly buried in a few moments. The
mice and the squirrels were in their dens, but I fancied the fox
asleep upon some rock or log, and allowing the flakes to cover him.
The hare in her form, too, was being warmly sepulchred with the rest.
I thought of the young cattle and the sheep huddled together on the
lee side of a haystack in some remote field, all enveloped in mantles
of white.

"I thought me on the ourie