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As I commenced my first day in Europe, the sunbeams wavered and glistened on the frost-crystals that covered the trees, and the flood of light that poured full into my opening eyes was painfully dazzling. Where we halted for breakfast, the station was neat and commodious, and its rooms well furnished. We fared sumptuously on cutlets and eggs, with excellent bread.
That the girl should favor the strong over the weak was something he could not understand a blemish that even her beauty did not excuse. A quarter-hour passed. The sun rose from the lap of the prairie and scattered the frost-crystals as though they had been mist. The chase was near its end. All moved more slowly.
In 1871 the early winter weather was delightful; the days all sunshine, the nights all starry and calm, calling forth fine crops of frost-crystals on the pines and withered ferns and grasses for the morning sunbeams to sift through.
There was no cohesion among the particles, and it could not be moulded into snowballs. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals tiny, geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost. The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the two men, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as they toiled.
The tops of the trees, only, were touched: still and solid as iron, and covered with sparkling frost-crystals, their trunks were changed to blazing gold, and their foliage to a fiery orange-brown. The delicate purple sprays of the birch, coated with ice, glittered like wands of topaz and amethyst, and the slopes of virgin snow, stretching towards the sun, shone with the fairest saffron gleams.
She searched again every foot of the road, but there was no gleam of gold in its white, frozen surface. There was the cold sparkle of the frost-crystals, and that was all. Comfort went back. At the turn of that road she saw Matilda Stebbins coming down the other. The pink tip of Matilda's nose, and her winking black eyes, just appeared above her red tippet.
Gold-pan, coffee-pot, and cooking-pail were soon thawing the heaped frost-crystals into water. Smoke extracted a stick of beans from the sled. Already cooked, with a generous admixture of cubes of fat pork and bacon, the beans had been frozen into this portable immediacy. He chopped off chunks with an ax, as if it were so much firewood, and put them into the frying-pan to thaw.
A second cold snap came on, but cold or warm it was all the same, an unbroken trail. When the thermometer went down to fifty below, it was even harder to travel, for at that low temperature the hard frost-crystals were more like sand-grains in the resistance they offered to the sled runners. The dogs had to pull harder than over the same snow at twenty or thirty below zero.
Then had come the struggle with the four feet of untouched snow that was really not snow, but frost-crystals, so lacking in cohesion that when kicked it flew with the thin hissing of granulated sugar.
He went to the window to observe the thermometer; but the dim daylight scarcely penetrated the fantastic frost-crystals, which, like a splendid exotic flora, covered the panes. Only at the upper corner, where the ice had commenced to thaw, a few timid sunbeams were peeping in, making the lamp upon the table seem pale and sickly.
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