"Yes," he said. "I've got our accommodations on board the Congressional. Get here if you can." I got through, and we took the Congressional Limited that February 10th for Washington. New York City was an almost unprecedented sight that dark-gray afternoon we left. A snowbound Canadian city it might have been by its appearance. A heavy, silent fall of snow; thick, soft, pure-white flakes. The north wind of the past few days had died away. The snow sifted almost vertically down between the canyons of buildings. Without a wind, the afternoon seemed only moderately cold. Freddie and I passed a street thermometer at the corner where we had gone to join our taxi, which could not get into the cross-street. The temperature was five below zero. Freddie caught my expression. He said, "This isn't New York cold. Can't you tell the difference? This is the cold of the north," still with that oddly solemn voice. Our taxi with its clanking chains rumbled its way down Broadway and across Thirty-Fourth Street to the Pennsylvania Station. I had never seen Broadway like this. A white street, piled with soft, white snow which covered up its familiar configurations, buried its curbs, leveled street and pedestrian walks into one flat white surface. A strange Broadway; featureless, blankly expressionless, like a man's face without hair or eyebrows. There was little traffic. Pedestrians in a crowd tramped the street's center. In the still cold the snow creaked and crunched under their tread. A few enterprising sleighs, brought down these past weeks from upstate, went by us loaded with people. The crowd was laughing, shouting. At the shop windows, almost closed in by huge piles of snow left over from the storm of the week before, disconsolate proprietors gazed out from under the shadow of the overhead pedestrian levels. Three o'clock in the afternoon; the street lights were all winking on, turning the pure white of the snow a pale lurid green with their glare. The crowd seemed taking it like a holiday, gay with shouts of laughter as it romped and shoved its way through the drifts. But there was no laughter within me. "The cold of the north," Freddie had said. It brought me a vague shudder. "Look there." Freddie pointed to the second level at Forty-Second Street. At a department store entrance crowds were coming out and going in. A huge sign in moving electric lights gave the information that here Canadian winter equipment could be purchased. And as I gazed, a man in gaudy flannel costume of brilliant colors came from the store entrance. An advertisement, no doubt. He swung out to the pedestrian level on skiis; poised, and came sliding gracefully down the incline to the main street level, amid shouts and applause from the crowd.