After that day I was house-bound for near upon a week. Later than its wont by a good hour, the dawn broke every day; but as in darkness so with the grey wan light, the wind never abated one iota of its whistling fury; the soft thud-thud of the flying snow reverberated on the panes; the white drifts at the street corners mounted steadily higher and higher; in the fireplace, where I already thought soon to start my summer fernery, I had the logs crackling and glowing with more than their old wintry might. Poor almond-blossom! I thought to myself again and again, as I sat industriously scratching away in the strange dumbness and the thin, queer light that fills the room in snowy weather. Yet this was not so ill a wind but that some good was blown my way. I found myself overhauling arrears of work at a surprising rate. When the wind fell at last, backing steadily to west, then to south-west, and there came a night of drenching rain—rain that felt like hot tea to a hand held out in it—I was ready for any sort of idleness and any wandering company. Two long days and nights the world lay under that simmering, steaming cataract. And then such a morning—almost the last morning of the month—rose over Windlecombe as made the mere awakening in one’s bed seem like a sort of first act in a miracle play. The sun had hardly breasted Windle Hill before I was out and clear of the village: its last red tinge had faded into night when I turned my tired steps homeward, and so to bed once more. Lying there cosily, with the delicious ache of thirty miles in my bones, and in my ears the lilt of a thousand melodies, all the glad day’s journey projected itself like swiftly changing pictures thrown upon the screen of the starry night. The Downs first—the green sea of hills that seemed to heave and subside as the violet cloud-shadows lazily drove from crest to crest; the unending sheep-bell music, and lark-song, and the playing of the gulls high up in the blue, like scraps of white paper fluttering in the breeze. Then down the steep hill-side to the sunny flats, where the plovers were at their love-play—each pair rising and falling, somersaulting together, crying continually, coming to rest a moment, then up again at the old interminable gambols.