One day there comes from the south a warm breath, and with it fleets of white clouds sailing across the blue upper deep, outstripped by their swifter shadows sweeping in blue squadrons along the glistening fields and darkening with brief passage the gray woodlands. Faster come the clouds out of the south and out of the west, till they crowd the sky, only fragments of its intense azure showing here and there between them, only now and then a gleam of sunlight flashing across the earth. Then the blue sunlit sky is quite shut away behind a low arch of gray, darkening at the horizon with thick watery clouds, and beneath it all the expanse of fields and forest lies in universal shadow. The south wind is warmer than yesterday's sunshine, the snow softens till your footsteps are sharply moulded as in wax, and in a little space each imprint is flecked thick with restless, swarming myriads of snow-fleas. Rain begins to fall softly on snow-covered roofs, but beating the panes with the familiar patter of summer showers. It becomes a steady downpour that continues till the saturated snow can hold no more, and the hidden brooks begin to show in yellow streaks between white, unstable shores, and glide with a swift whisking rush over the smooth bottom that paves their rough natural bed; and as their yellow currents deepen and divide more widely their banks, the noise of their onflow fills the air like an exaggeration of the murmur of pines, and the song of the pines swells and falls with the varying wind. After the rain there come, perhaps, some hours of quiet sunshine or starlight, and then out of the north a nipping wind that hardens the surface of the snow into solid crust that delights your feet to walk upon. The rivulets shrink out of sight again, leaving no trace but water-worn furrows in the snow, some frozen fluffs of yellow foam and stranded leaves and twigs, grass and broken weeds. The broad pools have left their shells of unsupported ice, which with frequent sudden crashes shatters down upon their hollow beds.