On one of the hardest days I met the old vicar of Windlecombe, and regaled him with the story of how I had just passed along the river-way as the tide was falling; how, at full flood, at the pause of the waters, the frost had sheathed the river with ice; and how, when the tide began to go down, this crystal stratum had remained aloft, held up by the myriad reed-stems; until at length, loosened by the sunbeams, it had fallen sheet by sheet to the wildest, most ravishing music, each icy tympanum, as it fell, ringing a different, dear, sweet note. And, in return for my word-picturing, the old man gave me a story of the same times to match it; how he had just learnt that certain ill-clad, ill-fed children—whom the law compelled to tramp every morning from Redesdown, a little farming hamlet miles away over the frozen hills, to the nearest school at Windlecombe, and tramp back again every night—were given a daily penny between the three of them for their midday meal; and how, as often as not, the bread they needed went unbought from the village store, because of the lure of the intervening sweetstuff shop. Later, in the red light of sundown, I met those children going home, as I had often met them, plodding one behind the other, heads down to the bitter blast. Each wore a great new woollen muffler, and had his pockets stuffed. I knew who had cared for them, and my heart smote me. Somehow the pure austerity of the evening—the radiant light ahead, the white grace of the hills about me, the star-gemmed azure above—no longer brought the old elation. The jingle of my skates, as they hung from my arm, took on a disagreeable sound of fetters. Though I carried them many a time after that, I never put them away without the honest wish that I should use them no more. But lucidly, these long spells of unremitting frost are rare in our country. Ordinary give-and-take winter’s weather—the alternation of cold and warmth, gloom and sunshine, wind and calm—brings little hardship to any living thing. Country children have a wonderful way of thriving and being happy, even though their diet is mainly bread-and-dripping and separated milk. As for wild life, we need expend no commiseration on any creature that can burrow; and while there are berries in the hedgerows, and water in the brooks, no bird will come to harm.