During the night it turned bitter cold. When morning came the sky was
a turquoise and the wind a gale. The sun seemed to give out light but
not heat--to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist flesh
if it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter land
the tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used as
a trap and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or until
it starves--starves with food on its tongue.

The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resisted
as rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering,
balls of ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses of
woodland paths snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs of
fodder-seeking cattle like points of glass.

Within their wool the sheep were comforted.

On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphere
and now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals and
dragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, being
so ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when the
grasshopper stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hot
in the nostrils and every bird holds its beak open and its wings
lifted like cooling lattices alongside its breast. In these veils of
dust swarms of frost crystals sported--dead midgets of the dead
North. Except crystal and dust and wind, naught moved out there; no
field mouse, no hare nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the naked
trees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as unseen as the owl's;
about the cedars of the yard no scarlet feather warmed the day.

The house on the hill--one of the houses whose spirit had been blown