n us; and now, in obedience to her message, a gay party of
us had left the railway, and had driven, sometimes in slushy snow and
sometimes on bare ground, up the old mountain-road, laughing and
singing and jangling our bells, till at length the great bare woods,
lifting their line forever before us and above us, gave place to bald
black mountain-sides, whose oppressive gloom and silence stifled
everything but a longing to escape from between them, and from the
possible dangers in crossing bridges, and fording streams swollen by
the fortnight's thaws and rains. Now and then the stillness resolved
itself into the murmuring of bare sprays, the rustling of rain, the
dancing of innumerable unfettered brooks glittering with motion, but
without light, from the dusky depths; now and then a ghastly lustre
shot from the ice still hanging like a glacier upon some upper steep,
or a strange gleam from the sodden snow on their floors lightened the
roofs of the leafless forests that overlapped the chasms, and trailed
their twisted roots like shapes of living horror. What was there, I
wondered, so darkly familiar in it all? in what nightmare had I
dreamed it all before? Long ere the journey's end our spirits became
dead as last night's wine; we shared the depression of all nature, and
felt as if we had come out of chaos and the end of all things when the
huge mountain gates closed behind us, and we dashed out on the plateau
where the grass, from which the wintry wrapping had been washed, had
not lost all its greenness, and in the sudden lifting of the
rain-cloud a red sparkle of sunset lighted the windows, as if a
hundred flambeaux had been kindled to greet us.

A huge fire burned in the fireplace of the drawing-room when we had
mounted the stairs and crossed the great hall, where other fires were
blazing and sending ruddy flames to skim among the cedar rafters; and
all that part of the house sacred to Colonel Vorse, and opened now the
first time in many winters, was thoroughly warm and cheerful with
lights and flowers and rugs and easy-chairs and books. We might
easily have fancied ourselves, that night, in those spacious rooms,
when, toilets made and dinner over, we re-assembled around the solid
glow of the chimney logs, a modern party in some old mediaeval chamber,
all the more for the spirit of the scene outside, where the storm was
telling its rede again, rain changing to snow, and a cruel blast
keening round the many gables and s