The Comforting Symbolism of Firelight at Play upon Clean Hearths _Facing p._ 4 The Powers of Light " 10 On the Topmost Boughs the Fairies Sleep " 26 The Rejoicing Shout of Coming Summer " 28 The Swooping Bat Darts Noiselessly " 34 Now the Mountaineer’s Girl Hurries Indoors at Nightfall from the Hallooing Specter of the Wild Huntsman in the Clouds " 54 Baldwins Mellow by Twelfth-night " 58 December Acknowledges an Unpitying Fate—Anything May Happen " 68 MINSTREL WEATHER CHAPTER I. FACES OF JANUS [Illustration] Though January has days that dress in saffron for their going, and noons of yellow light, foretelling crocuses, the month is yet not altogether friendly. The year is moving now toward its most unpitying season. Nights that came on kindly may turn the meadows to iron, tear off the last faithful leaves from oaks, drive thick clouds across the moon, to end in a violent dawn. January holds gentle weather in one hand and blizzards in the other, and what a blizzard can be only dwellers on prairies or among the mountains know. Snow gone mad, its legions rushing across the land with daggers drawn, furious, bearing no malice, but certainly no compassion, and overwhelming all creatures abroad: bewildered flocks, birds half frozen on their twigs, cattle unwisely left on shelterless ranges, and people who lose the way long before animals give up. Snow hardly seems made of fairy stars and flowers when its full terror sweeps Northern valleys or the interminable solitudes of the plains. The gale so armed for attack owns something of the wicked intention which Conrad says that sailors often perceive in a storm at sea. The rider pursued by a blizzard may feel, like the tossed mariner, that “these elemental forces are coming at him with a purpose, with an unbridled cruelty which means to sweep the whole precious world away by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.” We do not smile at the pathetic fallacy when we are alone with cold. The overtaken mountaineer understands—it means to get him. These things happen in places where weather is not obedient to wraps and furnaces, but where it must be fought hand to hand and where the pretty snow tangles its victim’s feet and slowly puts him to sleep in a delicious dream of warmth. Tropical lightning has not the calm omnipotence of cold when it walks lonely ways.