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That night he talked to us freely of his childhood, of the life on the old farm in Haverhill, which he has so vividly described in Snow-Bound, and showed us a venerable book, Davideis, being a history of David written in rhyme, the quaintest and most amusing rhyme, by Thomas Ellwood, a friend of Milton. It was the first book of 'poetry, he told us, that he read when a boy.
At night, if one opened a window, and peered out at the houses crouching beneath their thick white load, and at the deserted, snow-bound streets, over which the street-lamps threw a pale, uncertain light at night, familiar things took on an unfamiliar aspect, and the well-known streets might have been the untrodden ways that led to a new world.
And finally the frightful, unpardonable Russian campaign, wherein his fortune came at last to utter shipwreck amid the ice of the Berezina and the snow-bound Polish steppes.
Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and breadth of the land. "Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is this of the morning after the storm: "We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own.
This autumnal mellowness usually lasts until the end of November. Then come days of quite another kind. The winter clouds grow, and bloom, and shed their starry crystals on every leaf and rock, and all the colors vanish like a sunset. The deer gather and hasten down their well-known trails, fearful of being snow-bound.
There is infinite sadness in this scene under the fading sky, beside the cold welter of the Atlantic. One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores of the same ocean.
Here I manage to obtain half-frozen bread and a few eggs; after an ineffectual attempt to roast the latter and thaw out the former, I am forced to eat them both as they are; and although the sun looks ominously low, and it is six farsakhs to the next place, I conclude to chance anything rather than risk being snow-bound at Ahwan.
Never had Duane seen so many stars swarming in the heavens; the winter constellations were magnificent, their diamond-like lustre silvered the world. "I suppose you want to hear all the news, all the gossip, from three snow-bound rustics, don't you?" she asked. "Well, then, let me immediately report a most overwhelming tragedy.
But aside from its poetic and personal interest, and the pleasure it must give to every one who loves pictures from the life, "Snow-Bound" has something of historical interest. It describes scenes and manners which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient.
The 61st Division was left holding a line of snow-bound trenches between Gonnelieu and La Vacquerie, consisting of fragments both of the Hindenburg Line, the old German front line, and our own as it stood before the Cambrai battle opened. Except in the 184th Brigade the casualties suffered by the Division during the heavy German counter-attacks had been heavier than those at Ypres.
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