And when, with ruddy faces and stamping feet, we all rush in and crowd the old fireplace, how welcome the glowing warmth, how keen the relish for the appetizing spread upon the snow-white table-cloth: the smoking dish of beans, with crisp accompaniment of luscious pork; the hot brown bread so sweet; and, last of all, the far-famed Indian pudding, fresh and steaming from the old brick oven! How distinctly I recall those long and happy evenings around that radiant hearth, the games, the stories read from welcome magazines! Little we cared for the howling storm without. I hear the tick of the ancient clock in the corner shadowed by the old arm-chair; I see the glimmer on the whitewashed wall, the festooned strings of apples, sliced and hung above the fire to dry; I hear the patient, expectant stroke of hammer on the upturned log, and now the crackling burst of the rough-shelled butternut, yielding up its long and filmy kernel; I hear the apples sizzling on the hearth, the puffy snap of pop-corn jumping in its fiery cage, the kettle singing on the pendent hook--a thousand things; and what a precious living picture of sweet home-life they all bring back to me! But look! there is another hidden picture in the book of life--a shadowed page, which we had well-nigh forgotten. See that crouching figure in the dark, deserted street--that spurned and wretched outcast, without a home, without a friend! Perhaps if that broken heart has not already ceased to yearn, if the last spark has not yet been smothered by the driving, covering snow, we might still hear the faint and stifled sobs: [Illustration: THE SHADOWED PAGE.] “Once I was loved for my innocent grace, Flattered and sought for the charm of my face. Father, mother, sisters, all, God, and myself, I have lost in my fall. The veriest wretch that goes shivering by Will take a wide sweep lest I wander too nigh, For of all that is on or about me, I know, There is nothing that’s pure but the beautiful snow. How strange it should be that this beautiful snow Should fall on a sinner with nowhere to go! How strange it would be, when the night comes again, If the snow and the ice struck my desperate brain, Fainting, freezing, dying alone!” Life’s book is full of shadowed pages such as this; and it were well if in the midst of our contented homes, around our cheerful fires, we stopped to think and give a silent, heart-felt prayer for those who, by some strange, inexplicable fatality, seem doomed to walk with cruel burdens and with bleeding feet the path of life: no helping hand, no friend, no hope, no God.