and golden hour of infancy; commonly the flakes
reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively, without order or
beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the
circumstances under which this occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving
storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is falling. It comes
almost horizontally from the north.... A divinity must have stirred within
them, before the crystals did thus shoot and set: wheels of the storm
chariots. The same law that shapes the earth and the stars shapes the
snowflake. Call it rather snow star. As surely as the petals of a flower
are numbered, each of these countless snow stars comes whirling to earth,
pronouncing thus with emphasis the number six, order, [Greek: cosmos].
This was the beginning of a storm which reached far and wide, and
elsewhere was more severe than here. On the Saskatchewan, where no man of
science is present to behold, still down they come, and not the less
fulfil their destiny, perchance melt at once on the Indian's face. What a
world we live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the
most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller's coat, the observant
and the unobservant, on the restless squirrel's fur, on the far-stretching
fields and forests, the wooded dells and the mountain tops. Far, far away
from the haunts of men, they roll down some little slope, fall over and
come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the mass, ready
anon to swell some little rill with their contribution, and so, at last,
the universal ocean from which they came. There they lie, like the wreck
of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse
shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his ball, or
the woodman's sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the
sweepings of heaven's floor. And they all sing, melting as they sing, of
the mysteries of the number six; six, six, six. He takes up the waters of
the sea in his hand, leaving the salt; he disperses it in mist through the
skies; he re-collects and sprinkles it like grain in six-rayed snowy stars
over the earth, there to lie till he dissolves its bonds again."

But here is a bit of snow which seems less pure, with grayish patches here
and there. Down again to sparrow-level and bring the glass to bear. Your
farmer friend will tell you that they are snow-fleas which are snowed down
with the fla