You know that the snow, finer than flour, is beating through your clothing. You are chilled, and shiver. Sometimes-you stop for a while and with your hands over your eyes stand stooped with your back to the wind. You try to stamp your feet to warm them, but the snow, soft and yielding, forbids this. You are so tired that you stop to rest in the midst of a great drift--you turn your face from the driving storm and wait. It seems so much easier than stumbling wearily on. Then comes the in-rushing consciousness that to rest thus is to die. You rush on in a frenzy. You have long since ceased to think of what is your proper course,--you only know that you must struggle on. You attempt a shout;--ah, it seems so faint and distant even to yourself! No one else could hear it a rod in this raging, howling, shrieking storm, in which awful sounds come out of the air itself, and not alone from the things against which it beats. And there is no one else to hear. You gaze about with snow-smitten eyeballs for some possible light from a friendly window. Why, the sun itself could not pierce this moving earth-cloud of snow! Your feet are not so cold as they were. You can not feel them as you walk. You come to a hollow filled with soft snow. Perhaps there is the bed of a stream deep down below. You plunge into this hollow, and as you fall, turn your face from the storm. A strange and delicious sense of warmth and drowsiness steals over you; you sink lower, and feel the cold soft whiteness sifting over neck and cheek and forehead: but you do not care. The struggle is over; and--in the morning the sun glints coldly over a new landscape of gently undulating alabaster. Yonder is a little hillock which marks the place where the blizzard overtook its prey. Sometime, when the warm March winds have thawed the snow, some gaunt wolf will snuff about this spot, and send up the long howl that calls the pack to the banquet. Such thoughts as these were a part of our lives then, and with such thoughts my mind was filled as I stepped out into the storm, my trousers tied down over my boots with bag-strings; my fur cap drawn down over my eyes, my blue military overcoat flapping about my legs; the cape of it wrapped about my head, and tied with a woolen comforter. 3 Through these wrappings, a strange sound came to my ears--the sound of sleigh-bells; and in a moment, so close were they, there emerged from the whirl of snow, a team of horses drawing a swell-body cutter, in which sat a man driving, wrapped up in buffalo robes and blankets until the box of the sleigh was filled. The horses came to a stop in the lee of my house. There had been no such rig in the county before I had gone to the war. "Is this the Vandemark schoolhouse?" came from the man in the cutter. "No, Captain," said I; for discipline is strong, "this is my farm." "Ah, it's you, Mr. Vandemark, is it?" said he. "Can you tell me the way to the schoolhouse?"