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"Cheer up, ladies," smiled Bill, "the graphophone is a very good one, and in the office is a whole box of records of my own selection. If we are snow-bound we will not have to entirely forego even grand opera." Despite the handicap of the deep snow, results in the new camp were highly satisfactory to Bill Carmody.
We did not lose any time getting across the main divide. Being late in the fall we had great fear of becoming snow-bound on the trip. We left the head of the Arkansas river some fifty miles to the north so as to be able to cross the river without having the snow to encounter. After we were across the main divide I told them there would be no danger of being snowed in now.
Especially did he make her tell him of the New England winter; of the long pauses of its snow-bound life; its whirling winds and drifts; its snapping, crackling frosts; the lonely farms, and the deep sleigh-tracks amid the white wilderness, that still in the winter silence bind these homesteads to each other and the nation; the strange gleams of moonrise and sunset on the cold hills; the strong dark armies of the pines; the grace of the stripped birches.
Her aspect suggested the repose of a winter landscape, enjoyable in pictures, or on skates, otherwise nipping.... Mental directness, of no greater breadth than her principal feature, was the character it expressed; and candour of spirit shone through the transparency she was, if that mild taper could be said to shine in proof of a vitality rarely notified to the outer world by the opening of her mouth; chiefly then, though not malevolently to command: as the portal of some snow-bound monastery opens to the outcast, bidding it be known that the light across the wolds was not deceptive and a glimmer of light subsists among the silent within.
So, also, a few perish in long-continued snow-storms, though, in all my mountaineering, I have not found more than five or six that seemed to have met their fate in this way. A little band of three were discovered snow-bound in Bloody Canon a few years ago, and were killed with an ax by mountaineers, who chanced to be crossing the range in winter.
It was the morning promise of a fair day, and soon the dazzling sunshine upon the snow would become blinding to eyes unused to the winter prairie. But Grey was no tenderfoot. Such things had no terrors for him. His half-closed eyes faced the glare of light defiantly. It is only the inexperienced who gaze across the snow-bound earth, at such a time, with wide-open eyes.
He had sent out such and such expeditions to rescue snow-bound immigrants in the mountains; he had received hospitably the travel-worn transcontinentals; he had given freely to the indigent; and so on without end. I am very glad that even at second hand I had the chance to know this great-hearted old soldier of Charles X while in the glory of his possessions and the esteem of men.
Two hundred people, all anxious, most of them grumbling, were detained there prisoners, snow-bound and helpless. It was a hard case, for they were more than two miles distant with three feet depth of snow between from the nearest house. The nearest village was five miles away at least.
There is every presumption, from what we know of the two men, that Whittier's father and grandfather were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of home and neighborhood and domesticity which their gifted descendant too physically frail to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm has embodied in Snow-Bound.
At the dinner table in the hotel I heard a few more disheartening words. But after four I defiantly got my tarpaulin out and carried it to the stable. If I had to run the risk of getting lost, at least I was going to prepare for it. I had once stayed out, snow-bound, for a day and a half, nearly without food and altogether without shelter; and I was not going to get thus caught again.
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