But other thoughts arise in the mind of him who may chance to journey through the same scene in the desolation of Winter. The cold bleak sky girdles the moor as with a belt of ice--life is frozen in air and on earth. The silent is not of repose but extinction--and should a solitary human dwelling catch his eye half buried in the snow, he is sad for the sake of them whose destiny it is to abide far from the cheerful haunts of men, shrouded up in melancholy, by poverty held in thrall, or pining away in unvisited or untended sickness. But, in truth, the heart of human life is but imperfectly discovered from its countenance; and before we can know what the summer, or what the winter yields for enjoyment or trial to our country's peasantry, we must have conversed with them in their fields and by their fire-sides; and make ourselves acquainted with the powerful ministry of the seasons, not over those objects alone that feed the eye and the imagination, but over all the incidents, occupations, and events that modify or constitute the existence of the poor. I have a short and simple story to tell of the winter life of the moorland cottager--a story but of one evening--with a few events and no signal catastrophe--but which may haply please those hearts whose delight it is to think on the humble under-plots that are carrying on in the great Drama of life. Two cottagers, husband and wife, were sitting by their cheerful peat-fire one winter evening, in a small lonely hut, on the edge of a wide moor, at some miles distance from any other habitation. There had been, at one time, several huts of the same kind erected close together, and inhabited by families of the poorest class of day-labourers who found work among the distant farms, and at night returned to dwellings which were rent free, with their little gardens, won from the waste.--But one family after another had dwindled away, and the turf-built huts had all fallen into ruins, except one that had always stood in the centre of this little solitary village, with its summer walls covered with the richest honeysuckles and in the midst of the brightest of all the gardens. It alone now sent up its smoke into the clear winter sky--and its little end window, now lighted up, was the only ground star that shone towards the belated traveller, if any such ventured to cross, on a winter night, a scene so dreary and desolate. The affairs of the small household were all arranged for the night. The little rough pony that had drawn in a sledge, from the heart of the Black-Moss, the fuel by whose blaze the cottiers were now sitting cheerily and the little Highland cow, whose milk enabled them to live, were standing amicably together, under cover of a rude shed, of which one side was formed by the peat stack, and which was at once byre, and stable, and hen-roost. Within, the clock ticked cheerfully as the fire-light readied its old oak-wood case across the yellow sanded floor--and a small round table stood between,