e numbed with frost, shuddered when he touched
its coldness. It was that of a woman. Her dishevelled hair was mingled
with the snow. The woman was dead.

Again the child set himself to sweep away the snow. The neck of the dead
woman appeared; then her shoulders, clothed in rags. Suddenly he felt
something move feebly under his touch. It was something small that was
buried, and which stirred. The child swiftly cleared away the snow,
discovering a wretched little body--thin, wan with cold, still alive,
lying naked on the dead woman's naked breast.

It was a little girl.

It had been swaddled up, but in rags so scanty that in its struggles it
had freed itself from its tatters. Under it its attenuated limbs, and
above it its breath, had somewhat melted the snow. A nurse would have
said that it was five or six months old, but perhaps it might be a year,
for growth, in poverty, suffers heart-breaking reductions which
sometimes even produce rachitis. When its face was exposed to the air it
gave a cry, the continuation of its sobs of distress. For the mother not
to have heard that sob, proved her irrevocably dead.

The child took the infant in his arms. The stiffened body of the mother
was a fearful sight; a spectral light proceeded from her face. The
mouth, apart and without breath, seemed to form in the indistinct
language of shadows her answer to the questions put to the dead by the
invisible. The ghastly reflection of the icy plains was on that
countenance. There was the youthful forehead under the brown hair, the
almost indignant knitting of the eyebrows, the pinched nostrils, the
closed eyelids, the lashes glued together by the rime, and from the
corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears.
The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not adverse. The
corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic.
They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the
life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and
maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of
one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a drop of milk frozen.

Let us explain at once. On the plains over which the deserted boy was
passing in his turn a beggar woman, nursing her infant and searching for
a refuge, had lost her way a few hours before. Benumbed with cold she
had sunk under the tempest, and could not rise again. The falling snow
had c