"In this hut I discovered a fresh article of food--a soup made of hot water and weeds. They didn't eat it for the good it might do them, but simply for the sake of having something hot. At another hut in this village I found a similar concoction made with boiling water and chopped-up hay. "All the bread I found in the next hovel was broken, and had been begged from house to house. The occupants had burnt the wood, straw, and outhouses they had at the beginning of the winter, and {131} were now pulling the straw from the roof over their heads to keep the hut warm. "Although this was a new-fashioned hut, that is, one with a chimney, the occupants had stopped this up to prevent the fire burning too quickly, and to keep the heat in. This caused the suffocating smoke and tar-like odour that is found in the chimneyless huts. "On leaving this place we struggled through the snow to visit another house from which the roof had been torn, and which was almost embedded in the quantity of snow that the gale of the previous night had whirled round it. The mayor of the village, who accompanied me, told me that the family of five persons included a dying woman, and two children down with scarlatina. "With some difficulty we struggled through the four or five feet of snow that barricaded the door, and on getting it open we found the outer part of the hut half filled with snow that had been driven through the unthatched roof. We had some trouble to open the door leading to the inner room, and when this was done the mayor seemed surprised to find that the place was tenantless. "He enquired amongst the neighbours what had become of Nicolas Semine and his dying wife. Nobody knew, and all were lost in surmise as to what might have happened had they been driven forth by the storm of the previous night. We continued the tour, and half an hour later I came upon a scene the like of which I hope never to see again. "Eight or ten persons were crowded into a hovel {132} not more than ten feet square. An unconscious woman had been leaned against the brick stove to keep her warm in the stifling atmosphere. On the ground several dirty and ragged children were playing around two suffering creatures, whose arms and faces were masses of sores. I had already taken in these details when my guide told me this was Semine's dying wife and scarlatina-stricken children, that a man he pointed out was Semine himself, and that the ten-year-old boy lying on the stove was his eldest child. "I was not able to understand how the father and this boy brought the dying, and now unconscious, woman and the two children through the storm of the previous night. I had myself had an experience of the blinding violence of clouds of snow blown across the plains by a hurricane.