Why, some wintry day when you in overcoat and gloves are tramping comfortably across your fields on which snow is falling, stop and draw off one of your gloves, and holding out your hand, catch one of these little terrors, one of these dread arrows from the unseen quiver of all whiteness. Intercept it in its passage towards the earth and let it strike you, strike your palm, instead of striking the Mother who has been struck so often. One instant after it has reached your palm it has dropped its disguise and has turned into its old familiar self, a raindrop, a drop of dew. That is, under the influence of the warmth of your planetary fire, it has returned to its youth. For snow is the old age of water. Cloud, mist, rain, dew--these all are young: their old age is ice. When a dewdrop arranges itself for perpetuity, disposes itself in orderly fashion never to change again, stretches itself out in its _rigor mortis_, it has become a crystal. It has given up the ghost and has become a ghost--it has become snow, the ghost of the brook, the ghost of the rain. Now this--just this--was the Earth’s new trouble; and this ever since has been her increasing trouble and her losing fight: that over vaster and vaster regions of her surface she has lost the power to work the miracle of the resurrection--to bid the dead arise, take back its life, and having burst from its white sepulchre ascend again to the heavens. This is the trouble of our great Mother--that she has been fighting against old age as we her children fight against it. Old age has been descending upon her from the clouds; and wherever she has not been able to give back to old age its youth, there old age has stayed; and wherever on the earth old age has stayed, there the earth itself has become old. And now for us who live on the earth to-day, looking out upon the battle between the planet and the snowflake, how fares the fighting? If you should start from your home in our north-temperate latitude and travel northward steadily on and on, after a while you would find that the air gradually grows colder, myriads of living things begin to be left behind; fewer and fewer remain; those that do remain, whether animals or birds or flowers, begin to lose gorgeous color, begin to become white. The countless sounds of living things begin to die out. Everything is changed, colors are gone, songs have ceased. On and on you journey and always you are traveling towards silence, toward the white. And at last you come to the kingdom of the crystal, to the reign of the snowflake, to the old age of the earth; you come to one of the battlefields where the snowflake has conquered the planet. Perhaps on this northward journey the last living thing you saw in Nature was the evergreen--thriving there in unconquerable youth on the margin of unconquerable death.