We asked each other if our neighbors were all in the same plight with ourselves. They must be, of course, and many of them far less prepared to meet it. There might be whole families in the last extremity of cold right about us. I went to the window, and with my knife scraped away the rime of frost, an eighth of an inch thick, which obscured it, till I could see out. A whitish-gray light was on the landscape. Every object seemed still, with a quite peculiar stillness that might be called intense. From the chimneys of some of the houses around thick columns of smoke and sparks were pouring, showing that the fires were being crowded below. Other chimneys showed no smoke at all. Here and there a dull light shone from a window. There was no other sign of life anywhere. The streets were absolutely empty. No one suggested trying to communicate with other houses. This was a plight in which human concourse could avail nothing. After piling all the coal on the furnace it would hold, the volume of heat rising from the register was such as to singe the clothes of those over it, while those waiting their turn were shivering a few feet off. The men of course yielded the nearest places to the women, and, as we walked briskly up and down in the room, the frost gathered on our mustaches. The morning, we said, would bring relief, but none of us fully believed it, for the strange experience we were enduring appeared to imply a suspension of the ordinary course of nature. A number of cats and dogs, driven from their accustomed haunts by the intense cold, had gathered under the windows, and there piteously moaned and whined for entrance. Swiftly it grew colder. The iron casing of the register was cold in spite of the volume of heat pouring through it. Every point or surface of metal in the room was covered with a thick coating of frost. The frost even settled upon a few filaments of cobweb in the corners of the room which had escaped the housemaid's broom, and which now shone like hidden sins in the day of judgment. The door-knob, mop-boards, and wooden casings of the room glistened. We were so chilled that woolen was as cold to the touch as wood or iron. There being no more any heat in our bodies, the non-conducting quality of a substance was no appreciable advantage. To avoid the greater cold near the floor, several of our number got upon the tables, presenting, with their feet tucked under them, an aspect that would have been sufficiently laughable under other circumstances. But, as a rule, fun does not survive the freezing point. Every few moments the beams of the house snapped like the timbers of a straining ship, and at intervals the frozen ground cracked with a noise like cannon,--the hyperborean earthquake.