LITTLE PAULINA: CHRISTMAS IN RUSSIA

IT was nearing the close of a short winter’s day,—the day before Christmas. Thickly fell the snow, fiercely keen blew the northern wind, heaping the drifts into crannies and gullies, and then whirling them far and wide. The fir-trees were all behung with wreaths of sheeted white, that the next blast flung abroad in scattered showers. The sky lowered above all, gray, cheerless, and hopeless, as a man—setting his teeth hard, and facing the inclemency as he best might—cast his eyes up toward the heavens, and then looked around him, with an air that bespoke his having lost his way amid the solitudes of the pine forest.