tal-clear atmosphere. Many a wanderer, thus
deceived, plodded hopefully forward at sight of smoke above a roof-tree,
only to find his bourne, that seemed so near, still weary miles away.
The high Moors were a throne for death. Cold below freezing-point
endured throughout the hours of light and grew into a giant when the sun
and his winter glory had huddled below the hills.

Newtake squatted like a toad upon this weary waste. Its crofts were bare
and frozen two feet deep; its sycamores were naked save for snow in the
larger forks, and one shivering concourse of dead leaves, where a bough
had been broken untimely, and thus held the foliage. Suffering almost
animate peered from its leaded windows; the building scowled; cattle
lowed through the hours of day, and a steam arose from their red hides
as they crowded together for warmth. Often it gleamed mistily in the
light of Will's lantern when at the dead icy hour before dawn he went
out to his beasts. Then he would rub their noses, and speak to them
cheerfully, and note their congealed vapours where these had ascended
and frozen in shining spidery hands of ice upon the walls and rafters of
the byre. Fowls, silver-spangled and black, scratched at the earth from
habit, fought for the daily grain with a ferocity the summer never saw,
stalked spiritless in puffed plumage about the farmyard and collected
with subdued clucking upon their roosts in a barn above the farmyard
carts as soon as the sun had dipped behind the hills. Ducks complained
vocally, and as they slipped on the glassy pond they quacked out a
mournful protest against the times.

The snow which fell did not melt, but shone under the red sunshine,
powdered into dust beneath hoof and heel; every cart-rut was full of
thin white ice, like ground window-glass, that cracked drily and split
and tinkled to hobnails or iron-shod wheel. The snow from the house-top,
thawed by the warmth within, ran dribbling from the eaves and froze into
icicles as thick as a man's arm. These glittered almost to the ground
and refracted the sunshine in their prisms.

Warm-blooded life suffered for the most part silently, but the inanimate
fabric of the farm complained with many a creak and crack and groan in
the night watches, while Time's servant the frost gnawed busily at old
timbers and thrust steel fingers into brick and mortar. Only the
hut-circles, grey glimmering through the snow on Metherill, laughed at
those cruel nights, as the Ne