My fuel was pine bark, stripped from the surrounding trees. It came off easily in great sheets, making an imposing-looking pile as heaped in the kitchen, and burned like shavings. The night passed in alternate cat naps and firing up. I would doze, to wake up shivering, finding the room dark and the fire nearly out. Throwing on more bark, the flames leaped up. I dozed again, to wake up in cold and darkness as before. It was a gloomier camp than the one of the night previous. An empty house always has a tomb-like atmosphere about it, and, when alone, I prefer a bivouac under the trees. With morning came a heavy snowstorm, or rather a continuation of the snow that had been falling all winter. I started out. The pine boughs along the road brushed my face, where, in summer, they would have been many feet over my head. The strap of one of my snowshoes tore out of the wood, and left me crippled as to further progress until I repaired it. The snow was soft, and to get off the shoes was to sink in it to the middle. I was literally afloat on a sea of snow, and to get overboard was to founder and flounder--another proof of man’s miserable helplessness as compared with the goose. It began to occur to me that this storm was one of unusual severity. It blew violently, and the snow at times came in such whirls that I could not open my eyes for several seconds. If I had not in this story determined, in point of detail, to reduce everything to a rigid mathematical accuracy of statement, I might say that the snow blinded me for minutes, since seconds seem very long under these circumstances. Time seems to be a quality or a something, which, in point of length or shortness, is largely dependent on one’s condition and sensations. A good time is always short--a bad time always long.