sickness, delight and misery, ecstasy and despair. It makes you remember
your poorer neighbours, and sends you into their homes to see that they
too are fitted out with the armour of warmth and food necessary in the
long fight; and in your own home it draws you nearer than ever to each
other. Out of doors it is too cold to walk, so you run, and are rewarded
by the conviction that you cannot be more than fifteen; or you get into
your furs, and dart away in a sleigh over the snow, and are sure there
never was music so charming as that of its bells; or you put on your
skates, and are off to the lake to which you drove so often on June
nights, when it lay rosy in the reflection of the northern glow, and all
alive with myriads of wild duck and plovers, and which is now, but for
the swish of your skates, so silent, and but for your warmth and
jollity, so forlorn. Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and
the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books. It is
then that I am glad I do not live in a cave, as I confess I have in my
more godlike moments wished to do; it is then that I feel most capable
of attending to the Man of Wrath's exhortations with an open mind; it is
then that I actually like to hear the shrieks of the wind, and then that
I give my heartiest assent, as I warm my feet at the fire, to the poet's
proposition that all which we behold is full of blessings.

But what dreariness can equal the dreariness of a cold gale at
midsummer? I have been chilly and dejected all day, shut up behind the
streaming window-panes, and not liking to have a fire because of its
dissipated appearance in the scorching intervals of sunshine. Once or
twice my hand was on the bell and I was going to order one, when out
came the sun and it was June again, and I ran joyfully into the
dripping, gleaming garden, only to be driven in five minutes later by a
yet fiercer squall. I wandered disconsolately round my pillar of books,
looking for the one that would lend itself best to the task of