It is possible to be in a state of desolation under such circumstances, and it is possible not to be: that depends on the people, and on the mood they are in. Some groan over the trial; some, scarcely less agreeable, sit down and endure it with a most depressing patience; some shut the world out, and invent expedients to forget what sort of world it is; others, wider of mind and heart and clearer of sight, take the storm as it comes, and see all the enchantment of it. In that vast lily-flower that has curled down over them, and shut them in for a time, they find a honey that sparkles like wine. Lean out and catch a flake as it falls; it is a star, a flower, a fairy dumb-bell, a cross, a globe, always a wonder. Think, then, of the lavish millions of them!
One whom nature holds close to her heart has sung the snow-storm:
"Every pine, and fir, and hemlock,
Wore ermine too dear for an earl;
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch-deep with pearl."
One such snow in Seaton fell all day quietly, and all night, with a rising wind, and the next morning they woke in chaos. There was no up and down out of doors, but only a roundabout. There was a whirl, and a whiteness that dimmed off into grayness; there were no fences nor posts; a ghost of a pyramid stood where the barn had been; what had been trees were white giants coming toward them, apparently. They opened their windows to brush away the snow that piled up on the sill, and were blinded and baffled; they opened their doors to go out, and a solid Parian barrier was laid across the step, knee-high; they tried to shovel a path, and an angry wind and a myriad of little hands filled it in again. Patrick and Carl made a desperate effort to reach the village, and, after struggling as far as the avenue gate, were glad to get back to the house without being suffocated. At the door they found Edith catching snow-flakes to look at the shapes of them, and watching with wonder and delight certain thin, sharp drifts that a breath would have shaken from their airy poise, but which the wild wind never stirred even to a tremor.
"If one could only see the shapes of the wind!" she said. "Or is it, Carl, that the shape of the snow is the shape of the wind?"
Clara shook the snow from her brother's coat, and slyly dropped a snow-ball down his back; even Melicent forgot her dignity so far as to sit down in a bank, which enthroned her very prettily. Carl thereupon called her Mrs. Odin, and Melicent smiled involuntarily at the idea of being Mrs. Anybody. The mother and father, standing side by side, watched them smilingly from the window, and remembered how they used to play in the snow when they were children, and felt young again for a brief moment.
"But the spectres of rheumatism and sore-throat stand between me and all that folderol now," Mr. Yorke says, with a half-sigh.
"Yes, dear; but it is pretty to look at," says the wife cheerfully. "And we elders have the fire, which is more beautiful yet."
They pile wood on the fire. It blazes up, and reddens all the dusky room, and presently Mrs. Yorke wraps a scarlet mantle about her, and goes, with a little shiver, almost to the door, and calls out in the sweetest little bird-call: "Come in, children, come in! You'll take cold."
"Mother looks and sounds like an oriole in there," says Carl. "Come, girls!"