However, ontological speculations under an autumnal sky have their limit; and glad indeed were we, after long search among the pines and the hemlocks, to find, albeit it was late, a hostel in which were warmth and shelter for the night. XIII Winter in Canada § 18 I remember me, too, of a notable winter's walk in Canada. For some reason, one night in mid-January, Sleep forsook me. After wooing her in vain, I rose at three and lighted an ungainly but highly satisfactory stove. It had a draught like a Bessemer furnace, drawing through an ugly stove-pipe which ran bolt upright, turned sharp before it reached the ceiling, and disappeared in a hole in the wall--an apparatus quite the most conspicuous article of furniture in the room (it was in a hotel). On this I warmed a cup of tea, then donned all the warm clothing I could find; and in some forty minutes was afoot. My point of departure was a little Ontarian country town of some ten thousand inhabitants--we will call it Dummer. Dummer stood in a slightly higher latitude than the parallels which run through the belt of country skirting the northern shore of the Great Lakes, along which are dotted most of the centres of population; and accordingly it was exposed to a slightly severer wintry climate. At the time of my visit it was enveloped in snow. Snow lay deep over the whole land, thick on every roof, over the edges of which it protruded itself in irregular curves--solid cataracts suspended in air, and vainly endeavouring to complete their descent by long six-foot icicles. Snow-white was every road, save for the two dirty grooves beaten down by the hoofs of horses. Snow covered the country, far as the eye could reach; glistening like glaciers on the hill-sides, deep purple and blue in the patches shaded by the pines; only the woods showing black against the dazzling white, the perpendicular walls of the wooden farm buildings, the solitary trees and shrubs, and the straggling snake-fences--long, unshaped logs of split timber, their ends placed zigzag the one over the other, to keep the structure erect--relieved the white monotony. And yet this belt of country is almost in the same latitude with the south of France, with the Riviera, whence but a few days before I had received in a letter a violet!