Then, as a crowning touch, it powdered the pines, and we ran among them. Under their thick shelter the wind was not felt. We could hear the flakes hissing against the needles overhead. All about us the white powder was sifting down. A peep into the outside world showed all distances blotted out by the storm. By evening the grove was a powdered Christmas card, the naked farm fields mantles of white laid upon the earth, the lamps in our house beacons of warmth gleaming behind us. That snow melted, but others followed it, and by Christmas we were, as Mike put it, snowed in for the winter. In the barn was the warm smell of cattle. The motors had disappeared from our roads, and we went to the village in a pung, meeting other pungs on the way. It was as if we had slipped back a whole generation in time. Curiously enough, too, life became more leisurely, more familiar. The great summer estates were boarded up, the hotels closed. Only the real village people sat in church or waited at the post-office. We who in summer had known but few of our townsfolk now became acquainted with them all. We, too, left our pung in the horse sheds every Sabbath morning, listened to the nasal drone of the village choir, and joined in the social quarter-hour which followed the service. It was an altogether different world we live in from the summer world, and we liked it even better. What walks we had! Either with stout boots along the roads or with snowshoes into the deep woods, we took our exercise almost daily by tramping, and to us the countryside was a perpetual revelation. Almost the first thing which impressed us was the colourful quality of the winter landscape. Even on our own thirty acres that was apparent. At sunset of a still, peaceful day we could look forth from our south windows across the white lawn to the dark green pines and beyond them the exquisite iron-rust tamaracks, soft and feathery. The eastern sky would be mother of pearl at that hour, the southern sky blue, the western sky warm salmon, green, and gold, and the encircling hills a soft gray. Then, as the sun sank lower, a veil of amethyst would steal mysteriously into the feathery tamaracks and over the gray hills, all the upper air would blush to rose, and for a brief ecstatic ten minutes nature would sound a colour chord like a Mozartian andante.