creaming down the chimneys. After
all, Rhoda's and Merivale's plan of having us in the hills before
late-lingering winter should be quite gone, and doing a little Sintram
business with skates and wolves and hill visions, should have been
carried out earlier. To them it was all but little less novel than it
was to me, and Rhoda, who, although a year or two my junior, had been
my intimate, so far as I ever had an intimate, would not rest till she
had devised this party, without which she knew she could not have me,
even persuading our good old Dr. Devens to leave his pulpit and
people, and stamp the proceeding with his immaculate respectability.
As it was, however, it looked as though we were simply to be shut in
by a week of storm following the thaw. Well, there are compensations
in all things: perhaps two people in whom I had some interest would
know each other a trifle better before the week ended then.

The place was really the home of Rhoda and Merivale, or was now to
become so. Colonel Vorse, their father, who had married so young that
he felt but little older than they, and was quite their companion,
was still the owner of the vast summer hostelry, although no longer
its manager. After accumulating his fortune he had taken his children
about the world, educating them and himself at the same time, with now
an object lesson in Germany and now another in Peru, and finally
returning to this place, which, so far as we could see, was absolute
desolation, without a neighbor, but which to him was bristling with
memories and associations and old friends across the intervale and
over the mountain and round the spur. There was something weird to me,
as I looked out at the flying whiteness of the moonlit storm, in those
acquaintances of his among the hollows of these pallid hills; it
seemed as though they must partake of the coldness and whiteness, and
as if they were only dead people, when all was said. Perhaps Dr.
Devens, who half the way up had been quoting,

"Pavilioned high, he sits
In darkness from excessive splendor born,"

had another phase of the same feeling. I heard him saying, as I passed
him five minutes before, where he sat astride a chair in front of the
long oriel casement: "There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which
the vulture's eye hath not seen: the lion's whelps have not trodden
it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. He putteth forth his hand upon
the rock; he overturneth th