Hitherto I had always held the idea that people who allowed themselves to remain “snowed up” were very dull-witted and lacking in enterprise. Why not start clearing from the inside, beginning with the spadeful nearest the doorstep, and so go on clearing, space after space, until they had got through to the outer world? To me it seemed quite an easy thing to do if you went about it systematically. But one slight detail had never occurred to me, viz., what should be done with the first spadeful of snow when you shovelled it up from beside the doorstep, to say nothing of the next and the next! That was one of the questions that bothered us now, though it was not the first difficulty we encountered. At the very outset, of course, we all said, “Just get a spade!” But, alas, the spade was locked up in one of the inaccessible outhouses! Next we called for a broom, but all brooms were in the same building. Then I said, “Well, bring some shovels.” “Here’s the kitchen shovel,” said Eileen (Ursula pounced on that at once), “and here’s the scoop from the coal-scuttle, and here’s one of the small brass shovels from upstairs.” “But where is the big iron shovel?” I asked. “That’s in the coal-shed” (likewise inaccessible!). Virginia turned a deaf ear on the bedroom shovel, and possessed herself of the scoop. I had no alternative but to start work with the small brass affair that was about as effective as a fish-slice would have been! We each shovelled up a mass (most of it tumbling off the shovel again before we got it into mid-air), and then we looked at each other and enquired what we were to do with it. It did not seem advisable to carry it inside the house; and the only alternative was to toss it a foot or two away from us; but then, that only meant adding to the pile already there, which in any case we should have to clear away before we could get anywhere! It _was_ a problem. In the end we managed to clear about a square foot, and make a few small burrows in the mound around us, by throwing the snow as far away as we could each time. But what was that foot! We were still yards away from the coal-shed and the wood-house, with only a limited supply indoors, and still further away from the water. We had been working for a solid hour, and seemed to have raised a haystack of snow a little way off, where we had tossed our meagre shovelfuls. And then—as though to mock our feeble attempts—down came the snow again, and covered up the space we had cleared with such effort! We looked at it in absolute despair. “Why was I born an unmarried spinster?” exclaimed Ursula. “Oh, that a man would hove in sight—or whatever the present tense of ‘hove’ may be.” But no man obligingly hove in response! X Footprints THE snow was meaning to have a good time of it; there was no question about that. Further work in the clearing line was obviously impossible.