Folk therefore kept at home, wrangling together beneath the smoky rafters of their own cabins; for it was no light matter to show one’s nose round the corner. Some of the women, however, being less patient, would at times cautiously step outside their enclosures and visit their gossip-loving neighbours: ostensibly to spin in company, but in reality to whet their tongues and give vent to their ill humour. Meanwhile, the men were threshing stubbornly on behind the closed granary-doors, and from morning till late at night the flails smote upon the floor. The frost had nipped the corn; and so the grain was more readily threshed out. These gales brought with them more and more biting frosts. With mighty strokes they had frozen all the brooks and streamlets. The morasses were now solid. Even the mill-pond was coated over with a sheet of bluish transparent ice. Only close to the bridge, where the water grew deeper, was it still in motion: all the rest of its banks were fettered by the ice, and openings had to be cut for drawing water. No change of weather came till St. Lucia’s day. Then the frost slackened somewhat; the winds paused to take breath: they swept the plain more seldom and with less boisterous fury; the grey sky grew smooth as a well-harrowed field’s vast hempen-coloured surface, and so low that it seemed resting on the poplar tree-tops along the road. But presently, after the noonday Angelus, the frost increased a little and the snow fell in large flakes. Dusk then came earlier, and the snow still fell thicker and thicker, though drier and more powdery, until the night closed in. By morning the snow was three good spans deep; it covered the whole land like a fleece, veiled it under its own white expanse, shaded with bluish tints; and still it continued to fall without intermission. And so great a stillness came over the land that no noise, no sound pierced the masses of down, now floating to the ground. All had grown silent, dumb: as though, by some miracle, all things had stopped in awe, listening to the all but inaudible rustle of the falling flakes, so quietly floating earthward—a dim flickering whiteness, unceasingly descending! The night was now a whitish obscurity, a glimmering, pearly, immaculate dawn, like the finest bleached wool on earth; this glimmering from out of the infinite abyss—as it were, the frozen shimmer of the light of all stars, condensed and ground to dust in its downward flight from heaven—now besprinkled the whole country; and soon the pine-woods were shrouded, the meadows disappeared, the highways vanished, and all the village was lost in the silvery haze and blinding dust, and nothing more was to be seen but streams of sifted snow, wafted down as still and smooth and soft as cherry-blossoms in a moonlit night!