The snow was almost as high as the roof, for the cabin stood in an open place, almost out of the village, a field’s length from the road, and with neither hedgerow nor orchard to keep the snow away. Several wild gnarled cherry-trees grew in front of the windows, but they were so buried in the drift that their branches alone stood protruding like human fingers twisted and bent by some disease.—Earlier in the day, the old man had already cleared away the snow in front of the cabin, but he had at the same time covered the mound[3] so deep that it was impossible to distinguish it in the snow.—Antek set vigorously to work: the snow stood as high as a man, and—though lately fallen—it had caked together and hardened so much that it had to be cut out in lumps; and he sweated enough ere the potato-pit was dug open. But he worked willingly, now and then throwing a few flitters at the children, who were playing outside the threshold. At times, however, he would pause in his work to lean back against the cabin-wall and look around. Then he would heave a profound sigh, and his soul would once more go astray like a sheep lost in the shadows of the night. The sky was all covered with a whitish cloud, which hung at no great height. The snows lay extended like a huge soft fleece, forming, as far as the eye could reach, an immense plain, white with a tinge of blue; the air, misty with suspended crystals of frost, seemed to wrap the whole world in a delicate pellucid tissue. As Bylitsa’s hut was on rising ground, one saw thence the whole village spread out in a bird’s-eye view: those lines of snow-clad mounds, like huge molehills, straggling away in long strings round the pond, none completely bare, but all hid by the white sheet spread over them. Here and there a granary wall stood out, darkly prominent; ruddy-brown coils of curling peat-smoke went up; or a few trees peered out, grey beneath the dazzling mantle in which they were enveloped; and athwart this world all of silver tinges, voices travelled swift and sharp, heard together with the flails’ monotonous _rutta-rutta-rutta_, drumming underground, as it were. The ways were all snowed up; no one fared along them, nor did any living thing darken the silvery expanse of the fields. The hazy distances melted into one another, so that sky and earth were undistinguishable, save where the forest made a faint blue stain on the white, as if some cloud were hanging at the horizon. ----- Footnote 3: Over the potato-pits, dug deep as a protection from the cold, mounds are raised to protect them still more effectively.—_Translator’s Note._ Antek’s gaze wandered but for a little while over those snowy wastes; it presently returned and sought his father’s cabin; and in the search his attention was diverted by a cry from Hanka, who had gone down into the potato-pit. “Ha! they are not frozen! Vahnik’s store has been so frost-bitten that half must be given to the swine to eat; and ours—ours is quite untouched!”