Rose kneeled on the long window-seat and peered through the glass, occasionally rubbing away the mist that gathered so that she might the better watch the wild game the snow was playing. It was falling so thickly that the row of alfalfa haystacks resembled dim giants, advancing on the house stealthily but surely; the horse barn loomed darkly behind them and seemed enormous—a grim castle, or a dungeon. And how the snowflakes whirled and danced, never touching the ground, yet somehow turning it whiter and whiter. The prairie vanished in the whiteness, and even at a little distance the sky was all mixed up with it. Every now and then Rose could hear a long, wild shriek that swept around the house and died away slowly. It was the wind, of course, but it certainly sounded like a cry for help, and Rose wondered if, after all, it might not be a princess in distress. One couldn’t be quite sure, and Marmie had said that very morning that it was always the most unexpected thing that happened. “And a snow-storm,” thought Rose, “isn’t so unexpected as a princess.” She turned her head and looked into the big pleasant room. The fireplace had a fine blaze in it, and lying on the Navajo blanket that covered the floor right before it, busily reading, was Rose’s younger sister, Ruth. “Oh, Ruth, stop reading and come and look out. It’s getting blizzarder every minute.” Ruth grunted, turned a page, and remarked: “Wait just a bit, till I finish this chapter.” Rose looked out once more, just in time to see a man ride round the corner of the barn and disappear into the flying snow. “There goes Jim to round up the cows,” she exclaimed. “I guess the other boys have gone too. Probably we are going to have a sockdolager of a storm.” “Marmie said you mustn’t say sockdolager,” chided Ruth, abandoning her book and joining Rose at the window. “Oh, I wish we could go riding too. But I guess we won’t any more now, till spring. Don’t you hate to think of winter coming, Rose? We can’t go out at all most of the time, or just round the inclosure, and that’s no fun, and we sha’n’t have anything to do, and we sha’n’t see a living soul for months. That’s what Marmie said. I wish we had some other little girls to play with. Books are nice, but they aren’t alive and real—O-o-o see how hard it’s snowing now! I can’t see the barn any more.” The two little girls leaned close together, looking out at the storm that grew more furious as the moments passed. It shook the house, it blotted out the landscape, it even hid the haystack giants. It made them feel very small and lonely and far from everybody. The nearest ranch was five miles away. That didn’t seem much in summer, but now—why, no one would care to ride there now, and as for the two themselves, they knew they would not get far from home for months to come.