"Mother was very good to me; she gave me light, pleasant work to do, thinking to keep me busy. But however busy my hands were, my thoughts were free, and used their freedom to make me suffer. "Father had been gone eight days, when one afternoon mother came in from the barn, where she had been to shake down some hay for the cows, with a face so sober that I was frightened at once. "'Why, mother! what is the matter?' I cried. "'I'm worried about your father, child,' she said, and then she went to the window and looked out. "'Why, mother, if he started for home yesterday--' "'He would be just in season to be caught in the snow,' she interrupted, with a vehemence unnatural to her. "'Snow, mother!' "I rose, and went to the window. The sky was full of great masses of gray clouds, that sometimes parted, and showed a steel-colored background, intense and cold, and immeasurably distant. Wide before us spread the waste, white, uninhabited fields,--the nearest house a mile away, and its chimney only visible above the hills which hid it. A tawny, brazen belt of light lying along the west, where the sun had gone down, illuminated the snow, and gave a weird character to the whole scene. There was a high wind swaying the tops of the tall trees before the house; and once in a while you would see a fragment of cloud caught from the great gray curtain, and torn into shreds, or ravelled into a thin web, which seemed for a moment to shut close down upon us. It was a strange night, a strange sky. "I felt a vague alarm. But I tried to speak cheerfully. 'It is too cold to snow, mother!' "She pointed to the window. Even as I spoke the air was suddenly darkened by a multitude of fine flakes, that crowded faster and faster, and were swirled about by the wind, and quickly built up a wall around the door. "As it grew dark the storm increased. The wind, which had been blowing steadily all day, rose to a gale. It tugged at the doors and windows; it thundered down the chimney; it caught the little house, and shook it till the timbers creaked; the noise was truly awful. We got the boys into the trundle-bed as soon as we could, and then mother brought out her wheel, and I took my knitting. There was a great blazing fire on the hearth, and the room was so warm that the yarn ran beautifully. Mother made out her stint that night; she was a famous spinner, and the wheel went as fast and the yarn was as even as if she had not been so dreadfully worried about father. But every few minutes she would stop and say she hoped he had not started, or that, having set out, he would be warned in time, and stop by the way. "It was so strange to see mother, who was usually calm, so put about that I got very nervous, and was glad when she stopped the wheel, and twisted up the yarn she had spun. But as she turned around toward me with it in her hand, she looked so strange that I cried out to know what was the matter.