Yet if the furred and feathered people of pasture and woodland have no occasion to love the snow it is far different with the trees and shrubs and tender plants of the out-door world. These have yearned for it with love and a faith that has rarely lacked fulfilment. They talked about it incessantly, each in the voice of its kind, the big forest oaks with the cheery rustle of sturdy burghers, the little scrub oaks with the tittle-tattle of small-natured folk. Let the wind blow north or south or high or low the birches sang a little silky song of snow and the pines hummed or roared to the same refrain. Then it came, “announced by all the trumpets of the sky,” as Emerson says, but muted trumpets that blared without sound. The eyes saw the flourish of them, the nose mayhap whiffed the rich odor of the storm. You could see it in the sky and feel the light touch of its unwonted air on your cheek, but you could not say that the wind blew north or blew south when the culmination of signs made you sure of it. The storm may bleat along the hillside like a lost lamb or roar high above in the clashings of the infinite skies after it is well under way, but always before it begins is this little breathless pause between the dying of one wind and the birth of another. So it was that the first of this snow came to the woods. In the hush of expectation there was a certain feeling of awe. The trees felt it as much as I did and stood as breathless and expectant. Instead of clearly defined clouds, the whole air seemed to thrill with the dusky gray presence of a spirit out of unknown space, of whose beneficence we might hope, but of whom we were not without dread. And so the dusk of the storm we hoped for gloomed down on us in the breathless stillness and tiny flakes slipped down so quietly that the touch of their ghost fingers on my cheek was the first that I knew of their actual coming. The pine boughs high over my head caught these first flakes and held them lovingly and let them slip through their fingers only after many caresses, and soon through all the pine wood you could hear a little sigh that was a purr of contentment in the first faint breathing of the north wind bearing many flakes. Thus the snow comes to the woods. You can see its portent glooming in the sky for hours beforehand, smell it in the rich, still air and feel its touch on your cheek. When I stepped out from under the cathedral gloom of the space beneath the pines, I found the air full of flakes whirling down from the north and the field white with them.