It is at this season, in all northern lands, that the miracle of the snow-change, the new beauty of the snow-world, is transcendent. Truly, it is miraculous, that change: that new world, what a revelation it is, showing us the familiar as we have never known it or have of it but a dreamlike remembrance, showing it to us at times as we can hardly conceive it. To the continual element of surprise much has to be attributed, in our country at least. In lands like Scandinavia and Russia the periodicity and uniformity of the snow-raiment of earth take much from this element of surprise. Hardly have the inhabitants grown used to the greenness of grass and sprouting grain and fluttering leaf, after the long months of a silent whiteness become dreadful as a shroud, when a grey pall is spun out of the east once more and out of the north comes the wind of death, and the leaf is gone away on the polar air, the grain is gathered or withered, the sere grass fades like wintry grey-green seas fading into continual foam. Not so with us, who have those visitors, who can be so dread even here, for so short a time. The dark sword-thrust of the ice, compelling moving waters to silence and the blue rigour of steel, may reign for weeks in the Anglian fen-lands. Dense mantles of snow may cover the hills of the north for months, and the foreheads of Nevis and Schiehallion be white from the autumnal equinox till cuckoo-cry: for weeks the hill-fox and the mountain-hare may not drink at the frozen tarns, the moor-pastures may be lost to deer and sheep, and only the ptarmigan survive in the waste white places: for a week or two the boughs of the oak and chestnut, the plumes of the spruce and hemlock, the tresses of the larch and birch, may bend with the unmelting snowfall. But, at the worst, it is never long before a wind out of the south, or from the wet mouth of the west, breathes upon the fens, and the silence is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle; till the moveless steel is become a film, to be gathered some noon, like May-dew from the thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and gorse. It is never long till the _meh-ing_ of the sheep is again a sweet lamentation upon the hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last snow from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the jay screams in the woodlands as from fir-plume and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy thump their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of the North Wind, as in the Highland West and North we know so well and often to such bitter cost, may come to us with suddenness of tempest, raging in their mysterious wrath, and may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in the old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of the Northern Lights trample the souls of the dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. Every year there is sorrow upon some strath, grief in the glens, lamentation by hillside and moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land’s End there may be a tale of disaster.