And one night you go to bed, leaving a yellow dun sky sleeping over the hard fields. At a little before seven you rise, and drawing aside the blind with something of a shiver and a yawn, rub your eyes with amaze. In the half dark you seem to look out from your dim-lit room upon one large Twelfthcake, with a dark figure here and there for an ornament. And when you put out your candle, and draw up the blind, on how strange a sight do you look! How changed the appearance of everything since last night! What a heavy fall of snow there has been; and how sudden, and how silent! Against the slate sky a few dark flakes steal down, or a small drift dances, changing into a pearl-white as they sink lower, and are seen against the black bare trees, or the full evergreens. You are fascinated; you _must_ stand at the window and watch. That araucaria--how _can_ its long dark arms hold such a piled sheer height of snow? How deep and dazzling it lies upon the window sill! what a broad sheet upon the roof of that barn! how of the thinnest twigs of the nut trees and the acacias each sustains his piled inch and-a-half in the complete stillness! how the laurels bend down under great heavy loads of snow; and the erect holly shows a prickly dark gleam, and a burning berry here and there! All the sad traces of the dead Summer are buried, and the bustling birds chirp and huddle upon the anew foliaged branches, raining down a miniature snow-storm as they fidget about the trees. All the sodden leaves, and the black flower-stalks, and the bare fields are hidden now, and Autumn and Summer are buried; and the Winter days are come in earnest. Ah, yes, the sadness was more in the transition, and now that that is over and the change made, did you not discover that-- “Some beauty still was found; for, when the fogs had passed away, The wide lands came glittering forward in a fresh and strange array; Naked trees had got snow foliage, soft, and feathery, and bright, And the earth looked dressed for heaven, in its spiritual white. “Black and cold as iron armour lay the frozen lakes and streams; Round about the fenny plashes shone the long and pointed gleams Of the tall reeds, ice-encrusted; the old hollies, jewel-spread, Warmed the white, marmoreal chillness with an ardency of red: “Upon desolate morasses, stood the heron like a ghost, Beneath the gliding shadows of the wild fowls’ noisy host; And the bittern clamoured harshly from his nest among the sedge, Where the indistinct, dull moss had blurred the rugged water’s edge.”