For all the horizon's weight of dark clouds, clear sunshine lay on clear snow as they left the train and trotted along the road, carrying their skees beyond the outskirts of the town. Country sleigh-bells chinkled down a hill; children shouted and made snow houses; elders stamped their feet and clucked, "Fine day!" New York was far off and ridiculously unimportant. Carl and Ruth reached an open sloping field, where the snow that partly covered a large rock was melting at its lacy, crystaled edges, staining the black rock to a shiny wetness that was infinitely cheerful in its tiny reflection of the blue sky at the zenith. On a tree whose bleak bark the sun had warmed, vagrant sparrows in hand-me-down feathers discussed rumors of the establishment of a bread-crumb line and the better day that was coming for all proletarian sparrows. A rounded drift of snow stood out against a red barn. The litter of corn-stalks and straw in a barn-yard was transformed from disordered muck to a tessellation of warm silver and old gold. Not the delicate red and browns and grays alone, but everywhere the light, as well, caressed the senses. A distant dog barked good-natured greeting to all the world. The thawing land stirred with a promise that spring might in time return to lovers. "Oh, to-day is beautiful as--as--it's beautiful as frosting on a birthday-cake!" cried Ruth, as she slipped her feet into the straps of her skees, preparing for her first lesson. "These skees seem so dreadfully long and unmanageable, now I get them on. Like seven-foot table-knives, and my silly feet like orange seeds in the middle of the knives!" The skees _were_ unmanageable. One climbed up on the other, and Ruth tried to lift her own weight. When she was sliding down a hillock they spread apart, eager to chase things lying in entirely different directions. Ruth came down between them, her pretty nose plowing the wet snow-crust. Carl, speeding beside her, his obedient skees exactly parallel, lifted her and brushed the snow from her furs and her nose. She was laughing. Falling, getting up, learning at last the zest of coasting and of handling those gigantic skates on level stretches, she accompanied him from hill to hill, through fences, skirting thickets, till they reached a hollow at the heart of a farm where a brooklet led into deeper woods. The afternoon was passing; the swarthy clouds marched grimly from the east; but the low sun red-lettered the day. The country-bred Carl showed her how thin sheets of ice formed on the bank of the stream and jutted out like shelves in an elfin cupboard, delicate and curious-edged as Venetian glass; and how, through an opening in the ice, she could spy upon a secret world of clear water, not dead from winter, but alive with piratical black bugs over sand of exquisitely pale gray, like Lilliputian submarines in a fairy sea.