en the temperature of the air is at zero, the
thermometer, placed at the surface of the ground beneath a foot and a
half of snow, would probably indicate but a few degrees below
freezing; the snow is rendered such a perfect non-conductor of heat
mainly by reason of the quantity of air that is caught and retained
between the crystals. Then how, like a fleece of wool, it rounds and
fills out the landscape, and makes the leanest and most angular field
look smooth!

The day dawned, and continued as innocent and fair as the day which
had preceded,--two mountain peaks of sky and sun, with their valley of
cloud and snow between. Walk to the nearest spring run on such a
morning, and you can see the Colorado valley and the great canons of
the West in miniature, carved in alabaster. In the midst of the plain
of snow lie these chasms; the vertical walls, the bold headlands, the
turrets and spires and obelisks, the rounded and towering capes, the
carved and buttressed precipices, the branch valleys and canons, and
the winding and tortuous course of the main channel are all here,--all
that the Yosemite or Yellowstone have to show, except the terraces and
the cascades. Sometimes my canon is bridged, and one's fancy runs
nimbly across a vast arch of Parian marble, and that makes up for the
falls and the terraces. Where the ground is marshy, I come upon a
pretty and vivid illustration of what I have read and been told of
the Florida formation. This white and brittle limestone is undermined
by water. Here are the dimples and depressions, the sinks and the
wells, the springs and the lakes. Some places a mouse might break
through the surface and reveal the water far beneath, or the snow
gives way of its own weight, and you have a minute Florida well, with
the truncated cone-shape and all. The arched and subterranean pools
and passages are there likewise.

But there is a more beautiful and fundamental geology than this in the
snow-storm: we are admitted into Nature's oldest laboratory, and see
the working of the law by which the foundations of the material
universe were laid,--the law or mystery of crystallization. The earth
is built upon crystals; the granite rock is only a denser and more
compact snow, or a kind of ice that was vapor once and may be vapor
again. "Every stone is nothing else but a congealed lump of frozen
earth," says Plutarch. By cold and pressure air can be liquefied,
perhaps solidified. A little more time, a little m