while the larger brooks were beginning to burst through their wintry
coverings, and throw up and push on before them the rending ice and
snow that obstructed their courses to the rivers below, to which they
were hurrying with increasing speed, and with seemingly growing
impatience at every obstacle they met in their way. The road had also
become so soft, that the horses sunk nearly to the flank at almost
every step, and the plunging sleigh drove heavily along the plashy
path. The whole mass of the now saturated and dissolving snow, indeed,
though lying, that morning, more than three feet deep on a level,
seemed to quiver and move, as if on the point of flowing away in a
body to the nearest channels.

The company we have introduced consisted of four gentlemen and two
ladies, all belonging, very evidently, to the most wealthy, and, up to
that time, the most honored and influential class of society. But
though all seemed to be of the same caste, yet their natural
characters, as any physiognomist, at a glance, would have discovered,
were, for so small a party, unusually diversified. Of the two men
occupying the front seat, both under the age of thirty, the one
sitting on the right and acting as driver was tall, showily dressed,
and of a haughty, aristocratic air; while his sharp features, which
set out in the shape of a half-moon, the convex outline being
preserved by a retreating forehead, an aquiline nose, and a chin
sloping inward, combined to give him a cold, repulsive countenance,
fraught with expressions denoting selfishness and insincerity. The
other occupant of the same seat was, on the contrary, a young man of
an unassuming demeanor, shapely features, and a mild, pleasing
countenance. The remaining two gentlemen of the party were much older,
but scarcely less dissimilar in their appearance than the two just
described. One of them was a gaunt, harsh-featured man, of the middle