T. E. JANUARY I I HAVE just been to the house-door, to take a look at the winter’s night. A change is coming, the long frost nears its end—so the old ferryman has told me every morning for a fortnight back, and his perseverance as a prophet has been rewarded at last. As I flung the heavy oak door back, a breath of air struck upon my face warm, it seemed, as summer. All about me in the grey darkness there was an indescribable stir and awakening of life. The moon no longer stared down out of the black sky, a wicked, venomous-bright beauty on her full-fed, rather supercilious face: now she wore a scarf of mist upon her brows, and looked nun-like, dim-eyed, and mild. The stars had lost their cruel glitter. I stepped forth, and felt the grass yield beneath my tread—the first time for near a month past. And as I stood wondering and rejoicing at it all, some night-bird lanced by overhead, a note of the same relief and gladness unmistakable in its shrill, jangling cry. Hard weather in the country has a thousand enjoyments and interests for those who care to look for them; but when the frost holds relentlessly week after week, as it has done this January, the grimmer side of things comes obtrusively to the fore. There is too much shadow for the light. It is as though you rejoiced in the beauty of sunset beams on a wall, and it were the wall of a torture-house. You lie awake at night, and in the death-quiet stillness, hear the measured footfall of death—a dull, reiterated thud on the frozen ground beneath the holly-hedge, each sound denoting that yet another roosting thrush or starling has given up the unequal fight. Roaming through the lanes in your warm overcoat and thick-soled boots, you note the loveliness of the hoar-frost, at one step dazzling white, and at the next aglow with prismatic colour; and turning the corner, you come upon the gipsy’s tent, and realise that, while you lay snug and warm, nothing but that pitiful screen of old rent rags has stood between human beings and the terror of a winter’s night.