There are beautiful things done between October and April by the northwest frost and sun--pattern on pane, transformation of twig, fashion of flake, aurora, twin "dogs" of the spectral sun-bow--but nothing more marvellous and swift than the building, over fallen body or stopped vehicle, of the white and wonderful sepulchre of the snow. Out from the back of the sleigh as it stood, there tailed an indescribable drift, geometrically proportioned, beautiful beyond words. Fifteen full feet it extended, from the high sleigh-box windward, to the low drift-surface a-lee. In shape it was like the back of a saurian--one of those ruder, hardier things generationed before the earth was tempered by the Creator to the habitation of man. Within the sleigh-box another drift had formed, extending similarly from the wind-breaking frontboard along the floor to the back end. On the high seat above the central point of this latter drift, her feet buried in it, her upper body mummied in sacks and every loose thing the sleigh had held, froze and mumbled Lovina Nixon. Out alongside the bob-sleigh, a kinetic but uni-colored piece of the vast and volatile snow-swirl, John Nixon stamped up and down in the trodden hollow he had made on the leeward side of the drift, thrashed his long arms about his torso with a vigorous smack of leather mitt on shoulder-blade, and at intervals paused to lean over the side of the sleigh-box and shout encouragement to the immovable and helpless Lovina, cowled and cloaked in horse-blankets and gunny-sacks. "How's them feet, Lovina-girl?" would come the question--raised to a whoop in order to out-crow the hurricane and penetrate the hempen coccoon. After due pause, the response would come, querulous, monotoned and faint as a voice heard through a wall: "Ain't I said it often, that you'd--be the death of me--Jack Nixon. Why-for did you--let them team go? Just to save your tony friends--that's all. O-o-oh!" And John Nixon--though, with his own feet aching and his finger-ends tingling, he would be tempted to retort, "How about me?"--would respond, bracingly, "Never mind, girl--there, I think I hear Jim a-comin' now. Listen!" But the moments passed; the half-hours grew to hours; and out of the quivering white, with its perpetual hiss and whistle, its under-roar of distant wind-shaken groves, came no companionable jangle of bells. It was not until the hot bricks under Lovina's toes had lost their heat and she had commenced to cry and to labor against the creeping ache of cold by beating her feet with a dismal weak "tap-tap" against the bottom of the sleigh-box--not until stout John Nixon, aching from shoulder to waist with flailing his arms about his body, felt a cold doubt begin to rise even in the face of his confidence in hardy Jim Burns--that the shape and the sound of deliverance bulged and tinkled out through the texture of the storm-curtain, just ahead of the sleigh.