Meanwhile the snow fell thicker and faster without, and blew in fierce clouds against the windows. The wind was rising and gaining power, and it whistled wrathfully about the house, howling as in bitter mockery at the scene within. Sometimes it swelled into wild laughter, and again dropped into low and plaintive wailings. It was very dismal out in the cold, and hardly more cheerful in the warm sitting-room, where those two jaded souls knelt in earnest prayer. * * * * * A railway-train was fast in a snow-bank. There it had stuck, unable to move either backward or forward, since nine o'clock on Wednesday evening; it was now Thursday morning, the snow was still falling, and still seemed likely to fall, blocking up more and more the passage of the unfortunate train. There were two locomotives, with a huge snow-plough on the forward one, a baggage and express-car, and four cars filled with passengers. Two hundred people, all anxious, most of them grumbling, were detained there prisoners, snow-bound and helpless. It was a hard case, for they were more than two miles distant--with three feet depth of snow between--from the nearest house. The nearest village was five miles away at least. It was Thanksgiving-Day, too, and they had almost all of them "lotted" upon a New-England Thanksgiving-dinner with old friends, brothers, fathers, mothers, and grandparents. And there they were, without so much as a ration of crackers and cheese. It was noticeable that the women on the train--and there were quite a number, and most of them with children in their arms or by their sides--made, as a general rule, less disturbance and confusion than the men. The children, however, were getting very hungry and noisy by this Thanksgiving-morning. In one of the cars were clustered as fine a family-group as the eye would desire to rest upon. It consisted of a somewhat large and florid, but firmly and compactly built man of thirty years or thereabout, a woman, evidently his wife and apparently some two or three years younger, and three beautiful children. The man was large in frame, without being coarse, with a chest broad and ample as a gymnast's, and with arms whose muscular power was evident at every movement. His hair and beard (which latter he wore full, as was just beginning to be the custom) were dark brown in color, and thick and strong almost to coarseness in texture; his eye was a clear hazel, full, quick, and commanding, sometimes almost fierce; while an aquiline nose, full, round forehead, and a complexion bronzed by long exposure to all sorts of weather, gave him an aspect to be noted in any throng he might be thrown into. There was a constant air of pride and determination about the man, which softened, however, whenever his glance fell upon wife or children. At such times his face lighted up with a smile of peculiar beauty and sweetness.