When I started, there was no moon, there were no stars; my sole light was the skyey reflection of the electric lamps of the city; and only this for many miles enabled me to distinguish the grooves in which I had to walk from the high ridge of snow between them which I had to avoid. When I skirted the lee side of a high hill, or passed the distal edge of a thick wood, I floundered from one to other in the dark. The landscape, such of it as could be seen under a leaden-grey sky, was a vast monochrome, an expanse of dull white picked out with blotches and points and lines of black. Not a living thing was to be seen. Not a sound was to be heard. And, what particularly struck a lover of country walks, not the faintest suspicion of any kind of a scent was to be detected. Everything seemed to be dumb and dead; and the tiny flakes which fell in myriads, fell so silently, so pitilessly, had seemingly for their object the making of all things, if possible, still more dumb and dead.--There is always something poetic about snow in England. There is something playful and jocular in the way in which lusty standard rose-trees, stout shrubs, and sturdy hedges don aged Winter's garb, as a laughing maid will half demurely wear her grand-dam's cap. In the Western Hemisphere, away from the genial influences of the Gulf Stream, even in the same latitudes, winter is a more serious matter. The snow comes "to stay." There is little jocosity about it. It lies several feet thick. If it disappears during a temporary thaw, it comes again very soon. Here the trees do not sport with it. They put up with it. They stand knee-deep in it, leafless, motionless, scentless, soundless. If there is a wind, it sweeps through them with a long thin swish, like the wail of a host of lost spirits seeking shelter. Not a branch falls--the autumn blasts brought down all that was frangible. Only frozen tears fall, fall from the ice-encrusted twigs. For miles on either side of me stood these patient trees; thick, black, heavy-boughed cedars, their stout trunks buried in snow, squatting, like Mr Kipling's Djinn of All Deserts, on their haunches and vainly "thinking a Magic" to make idling Winter "hump himself"; beech-trees, naked but for a few scattered sere and yellow leaves fluttering about their waists; the drooping-branched elm, not half so graceful as when full-leafed; elegant maples with a tracery of twigs far too fine to be compared to lace. These trees formed often the outermost fringe of thick woods. Into these I penetrated. A profound silence pervaded them, a silence so intense, so all-embracing, it seemed to overflow the forest, to go out into space, to enwrap the world in its grasp. Not a thing stirs. To be alive in that shrine of death-like soundlessness seems desecration. It is supreme, infinite, absolute; you, the living, moving onlooker, are finite and relative, a thing of time and space. To think is to disturb the serenity of its repose, for to