Then winter arrived “on his snow-white car,” as poets say, and often such storms blew that even grown-up people feared to face them. But Harry would not give in. On evenings like these John would be dispatched to meet Harry, and many an anxious glance from the dining-room window would his mother cast, until she saw them coming up the long avenue, Eily always first, feathering through the snow, and barking for very joy as she neared the house.
Sometimes the roads would be so blocked with snow, that Harry found it far more convenient to walk along on the top of the stone fences, often missing his feet, and getting plunged nearly over his head in a snow-bank.
In the early part of January, 186-, I forget the exact day and date, one of the most fierce and terrible snowstorms that old men ever remembered, swept over the northern shires of Scotland.
When Harry left for school that morning there seemed little cause for alarm. There was no sunshine however, and the whole sky was covered by an unbroken wall of blue-grey cloud. Towards the forenoon snow began to fall—a kind of soft hail like millet seeds. The ground was hard and dry to receive it, so it did not melt.
The schoolboys tried to mould it into snowballs, but it would not “make,” it would not stick together—evidence in itself that the frost was intense.
Gradually this soft, fine hail changed to big, dry flakes. Then the wind began to rise, and moan around the chimneys, and go shrieking through the leafless boughs of the ash trees and elms. The snowfall increased in density every minute. Looking up through the falling flakes, you could not have seen three yards.
Dominie Roberts at two o’clock began to get uneasy, and gave many an anxious glance towards the windows, now getting quickly snowed up. So great, too, was the frost that, though a roaring fire of wood and peats burned on the hearth, the panes were flowered and frozen.
At half-past two it began to get rapidly dark, so the dominie dismissed his class with earnest injunctions to those boys who had far to go, not to delay on the road, but to hurry home at once.
It might have been thought that on an evening like this, Harry would have been glad of companionship on the road. Not he. He went off like a young colt, with Eily galloping round him, as soon as ever he got outside the gate.
The wind blew right in his face, however, and the drift was whirling like smoke right over every fence. The roads were also barricaded every few yards with high wreaths of snow, blown off the fields and hills.