NOVICE AND EXPERT. Though many years have passed since that dismal storm in the spring of 1815, when Hamilton and I spent a long disconsolate night of enforced waiting, I still hear the roaring of the northern gale, driving round the house-corners as if it would wrench all eaves from the roof. It shrieked across the garden like malignant furies, rushed with the boom of a sea through the cedars and pines, and tore up the mountain slope till all the many voices of the forest were echoing back a thousand tumultuous discords. Again, I see Hamilton gazing at the leaping flames of the log fire, as if their frenzied motion reflected something of his own burning grief. Then, the agony of our utter helplessness, as long as the storm raged, would prove too great for his self-control. Rising, he would pace back and forward the full length of the hunting-room till his eye would be caught by some object with which the boy had played. He would put this carefully away, as one lays aside the belongings of the dead. Afterwards, lanterns, which we had placed on the oak center table on coming in, began to smoke and give out a pungent, burning smell, and each of us involuntarily walked[Pg 39] across to a window and drew aside the curtains to see how daylight was coming on. The white glare of early morning flooded the room, but the snow-storm had changed to driving sleet and the panes were iced from corner to corner with frozen rain-drift. How we dragged through two more days, while the gale raved with unabated fury, I do not know. Poor Eric was for rushing into the blinding whirl, that turned earth and air into one white tornado; but he could not see twice the length of his own arm, and we prevailed on him to come back. On the third night, the wind fell like a thing that had fretted out its strength. Morning revealed an ocean of billowy drifts, crusted over by the frozen sleet and reflecting a white dazzle that made one's eyes blink. Great icicles hung from the naked branches of the sheeted pines and snow was wreathed in fantastic forms among the cedars. [Pg 39] We had laid our plans while we waited. After lifting the canvas from the camping-ground and seeking in vain for more trace of the fugitives, we despatched a dozen different search-parties that very morning, Eric leading those who were to go on the river-side of the Chateau, and I some well-trained bushrangers picked from the habitants of the hillside, who could track the forest to every Indian haunt within a week's march of the city. After putting my men on a trail with instructions to send back an Indian courier to report each night, I hunted up an old habitant
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