thought he'd fancy all the time. You bet he fed that gurrl on my things—I know he did. It's just like him.—I'll bet they laughed together over my letters. I'll bet anything they did——”      

       “Nay,” said I. “He'd burn your letters for fear they'd give him away.”      

       There was a black look on her yellow face. Suddenly a voice was heard calling. She poked her head out of the shed, and answered coolly:     

       “All right!” Then, turning to me: “That's his mother looking after me.”      

       She laughed into my face, witch-like, and we turned down the road.     

       When I awoke, the morning after this episode, I found the house darkened with deep, soft snow, which had blown against the large west windows, covering them with a screen. I went outside, and saw the valley all white and ghastly below me, the trees beneath black and thin looking like wire, the rock-faces dark between the glistening shroud, and the sky above sombre, heavy, yellowish-dark, much too heavy for the world below of hollow bluey whiteness figured with black. I felt I was in a valley of the dead. And I sensed I was a prisoner, for the snow was everywhere deep, and drifted in places. So all the morning I remained indoors, looking up the drive at the shrubs so heavily plumed with snow, at the gateposts raised high with a foot or more of extra whiteness. Or I looked down into the white-and-black valley, that was utterly motionless and beyond life, a hollow sarcophagus.     

       Nothing stirred the whole day—no plume fell off the shrubs, the valley was as abstracted as a grove of death. I looked over at the tiny, half-buried farms away on the bare uplands beyond the valley hollow, and I thought of Tible in the snow, of the black, witch-like little Mrs. Goyte. And the snow seemed to lay me bare to influences I wanted to escape.     

       In the faint glow of half-clear light that came about four o'clock in the afternoon, I was roused to see a motion in the snow away below, near where the thorn-trees stood very black and dwarfed, like a little savage group, in the dismal white. I watched closely. Yes, there was a flapping and a struggle—a big bird, it must be, labouring in the snow. I wondered. Our biggest birds, in the valley, were the large hawks that often hung flickering opposite my windows, level 

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