It was a bitterly cold winter; the wind swept fiercely through the cut between Sunset and Rocky hills, rushing down the main street at Glen Village, separating the neighbours on either side more effectively than drifts of snow could have done. However deep, there is something cheerful and exhilarating about snow. Children think that it is sent for their special amusement; the shy young man, who drives his sweetheart over to the “Social” in the next village, needs no excuse for putting his arm around her, for light sleighs have been known to upset suddenly without the slightest warning. The old folks are cheerful in their reminiscences of just such episodes, and compare each storm with some long-remembered one in the thirties, noting always the frail and inferior wearing quality of modern snow. But Wintry Wind is the most exasperating and prying of nature’s messengers, whose mission is the uncovering of weaknesses in all things animate and inanimate. It soon discovers if your eyes are sensitive, your hat a size too small, that you are subject to rheumatism, that your breath is short when you walk uphill, and that your knees bend as you go down, and so turns your cloak over your head like an extinguisher. It knows precisely which shingle lacks a nail, and will lay bare spots calculated to make obstinate leaks. It also spies out the blind whose catch is loose, the gate with one hinge, the elm that is split in the crotch, and the particular chimney flue that leads to the room where your most important relation (who suffers from bronchitis) is being entertained at tea, and it gauges accurately which article on the clothes-line you value the most. It was this sort of weather, combined with his daughter Margaret’s delicate health, that made Ezra Tolford, living at the Glen Mill, for which the village was named, resolve to have a hired man. Now Ezra Tolford had many titles to local distinction. He was Deacon of the First Church, and his parents had been zealous before him, his grandfather having had the hardihood to fly to the woods with the church plate on the approach of the British in 1779, thereby risking his life _via_ wild beasts, Hessians, and exposure,—a fact that is brought up in every local historical discourse to this day. Incidentally it might be mentioned that the plucky ancestor (owing to fright and darkness) was never able afterwards to locate the marshy spot where the precious metal was buried; this fact, however, is usually omitted.