st rigging
to the white deck below, while the gnarled limbs of the big elms
looked like the muscles of giants wrestling with the storm king. This
storm to-day is not "announced by all the trumpets of the sky." It
comes softly as the breath of morning on a May meadow. It silences
every sound and curtains you into a rare studio where you may admire
its own exceeding beauty. There have not been so many beautiful snow
crystals in any storm of the winter. You may see half a dozen
different varieties on your coat sleeve with the naked eye, and you
pull out a strong lens the better to observe the exceeding beauty of
these six pointed stars. They are among Nature's most exquisite
forms, and they are shown in bewildering variety. The molecules of
snow arrange themselves in crystals of the hexagonal system, every
angle exactly sixty degrees. The white color of the snow is caused by
a combination of the prismatic colors of these snow crystals. Some of
them are regular hexagons, with six straight sides; others are like a
wheel with six spokes, with jewels clinging to each spoke. Many men
have spent a lifetime in the study of these fairy forms. W. A.
Bentley, of the United States weather bureau, after twenty years of
faithful work, has more than a thousand photographs of these crystals,
no two alike. Every storm yields him a new set of pictures.

* * * * *

For a little while the snow grows damp and the flakes grow larger,
making downy blankets for the babes in the woods--the hepaticas, the
mosses, the ferns. The catkins of the hazelbrush are edged with white.
The slender stems of the meadow-sweet begin to droop beneath the
weight of the snow. The delicate yellow pointed buds of the wild
gooseberry look like topaz gems in a setting of white pearl. The snow
falls faster and the wood becomes a ghost world. The dull red torches
of the smooth sumac are extinguished. The fine, delicate spray of the
hop hornbeam is a fairy net whose every mesh is fringed with
immaculate beauty. The little clusters of fine twigs here and there in
the hackberry grow into spheres of fleecy fruit. The snow sticks to
the tree trunks and makes a compass out of every one, a more accurate
compass than the big radical leaves of the rosin weed in the early
fall.

As the day darkens the ghost-like effect of the storm in the woods is
all the more marked. The trees stand like silent specters, and at
every turn in the path you come up