lacked, all tributary imagination furnished, and I said to myself, This is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted in a sepulchre. Dismounting, and warily picking my way down the dangerous declivity--horse and man both sliding now and then upon the icy ledges--at length I drove, or the blast drove me, into the largest square, before one side of the main edifice. Piercingly and shrilly the shotted blast blew by the corner; and redly and demoniacally boiled Blood River at one side. A long woodpile, of many scores of cords, all glittering in mail of crusted ice, stood crosswise in the square. A row of horse-posts, their north sides plastered with adhesive snow, flanked the factory wall. The bleak frost packed and paved the square as with some ringing metal. The inverted similitude recurred--"The sweet, tranquil Temple garden, with the Thames bordering its green beds," strangely meditated I. But where are the gay bachelors? Then, as I and my horse stood shivering in the wind-spray, a girl ran from a neighboring dormitory door, and throwing her thin apron over her bare head, made for the opposite building. "One moment, my girl; is there no shed hereabouts which I may drive into?" Pausing, she turned upon me a face pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery. "Nay," faltered I, "I mistook you. Go on; I want nothing." Leading my horse close to the door from which she had come, I knocked. Another pale, blue girl appeared, shivering in the doorway as, to prevent the blast, she jealously held the door ajar. "Nay, I mistake again. In God's name shut the door. But hold, is there no man about?" That moment a dark-complexioned well-wrapped personage passed, making for the factory door, and spying him coming, the girl rapidly closed the other one. "Is there no horse-shed here, Sir?" "Yonder, the wood-shed," he replied, and disappeared inside the factory. With much ado I managed to wedge in horse and pung between scattered piles of wood all sawn and split. Then, blanketing my horse, and piling my buffalo on the blanket's top, and tucking in its edges well around the breastband and breeching, so that the wind might not strip him bare, I tied him fast, and ran lamely for the factory door, still with frost, and cumbered with my driver's dread-naught. Immediately I found myself standing in a spacious place, intolerably lighted by long rows of windows, focusing inward the snowy scene without. At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.