One must have been cursed with a sluggish, half-dead body and a torpid soul, had he not responded to the influences under which our gay party spent the next few hours. Innumerable snow-flakes had carried down from the air every particle of impurity, and left it sweet and wholesome enough to seem the elixir of immortal youth. It was so tempered also, that it only braced and stimulated. The raw, pinching coldness of the previous day was gone. The sun, undimmed by a cloud, shone genially, and eaves facing the south were dripping, the drops falling like glittering gems. Now and then a breeze would career down upon them, and, catching the light snow from the adjacent fence, would cast it into their faces as a mischievous school-boy might. "Stop that!" cried Lottie to one of these sportive zephyrs. "De you call that a gust of wind? I declare it was a viewless sprite, or a party of snow elves, playing their mad pranks upon us." "I prefer fairies less cold and ethereal," said De Forrest, with a meaning look at the speaker. "What do you prefer, Mr. Hemstead?" she asked. "But where we people of the world speak of fairies, sprites, and nymphs, I suppose you permit yourself to think only of angels." "Were it so," he replied, "I should still be of the same mind as Mr. De Forrest, and be glad that you are not an angel." "Why so?" "You might use your wings and leave us." "Were I one, I would not leave you after that speech. But see how far I am from it. I weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds." "I wish you were no farther off than that." "What do you mean?" "It's not our weight in avoirdupois that drags us down. But I am not going to preach any more to-day. Listen to the bells--how they echo from the hill-side!" "Yes, Julian, listen to Bel," said Lottie to De Forrest, who was about to speak. "I'm talking to Mr. Hemstead. See those snow-crystals on my muff. How can you account for so many odd and beautiful shapes?" "To me all the countless forms in nature," said Hemstead, "prove an infinite mind gratifying itself. They are expressions of creative thought." "Nonsense! God doesn't bother with such little things as these." "We do not know what seems small or great to Him. The microscope reveals as much in one direction as the telescope in another, and the common house-fly seems in size midway in animal life." "And do you believe that the Divine hand is employed in forming such trifles as these?" "The Divine will is. But these trifles make the avalanche and the winter's protection for next year's harvest." "What is that?" asked Harcourt from the front seat, where he was driving. "Do you know," cried Lottie, "that Mr Hemstead thinks everything we see, even to nature's smallest trifles, an 'expression of the Divine creative thought.'" "Is that scene such an expression?" asked Harcourt, with a sneering laugh, in which the others joined.