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All the toilet articles were ivory and the furniture white, with decorations of white lilies and silver. In one corner stood a bed of silver with white draperies. Beyond, Maria had a glimpse of a bath in white and silver, and a tiny dressing-room which looked like frost-work. When the maid left her for a moment Maria stood and gazed breathless.

Wood-carving has ever been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this prodigious task. It is the frost-work on one's window-panes interpreted in polished oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless, a more moving illustration of the peculiar patience, the sacred candour, of the great time.

If you examine with a lens some of the richest colours of flowers, as, for instance, those of the gentian and dianthus, you will find their texture is produced by a crystalline or sugary frost-work upon them. In the lychnis of the high Alps, the red and white have a kind of sugary bloom, as rich as it is delicate.

But that gave no relief, no shadow of relief, to the misery which was now consuming me. Here was an end, in one hour, to the happiness of a life. In one hour it had given way, root and branch had melted like so much frost-work, or a pageant of vapory exhalations. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and yet for ever and ever, I comprehended the total ruin of my situation.

So she went sorrowfully on, till Winter, riding on the strong North-Wind, came rushing by, with a sparkling ice-crown in his streaming hair, while from beneath his crimson cloak, where glittering frost-work shone like silver threads, he scattered snow-flakes far and wide. "What do you seek with me, fair little Spirit, that you come so bravely here amid my ice and snow?

The room looked very bright and pleasant by the first morning light that shone upon the intricate frost-work on the window; and Henrietta, as usual, was too much lost in gazing at the branches of the elms and the last year's rooks' nests, to make the most of her time; so that the bell for prayers rang long before she was ready. Her mamma would not leave her, and remained to help her.

It shivered down the long stovepipe, too, inside the waiting-room. The stove had been kept red-hot all that dull gray afternoon, but the window-panes were still white with heavy frost-work. Half an hour before the five o'clock train was due from the city, two boys came running up the railroad track with their skates in their hands.

Skirt over skirt of fluffy net flowed round Maudita, and let their misty clouds blow about the trailing ornaments of long green grasses and blue corn-flowers that she wore, while puffs and falls half veiled the stomacher of Mexican turquoise and diamond sparks, whose device imitated a spray of the same flowers; and in among the masses of her glittering, waving auburn hair rested a slender diadem of the turquoise again that whose nameless tint, half blue, half green, makes it an inestimable treasure among the Navajoes, as it was once among the Aztecs, who called it the chalchivitl; each cluster of Maudita's turquoises set in a frost-work of finest diamonds a splendid toilette indeed, as fresh and radiant as the morning dew upon the meadows.

A breath of New England air touches the cathedral windows of the Old World, and I had almost said bedims them with a film of evanescent frost-work; yet, as that lingers, we suddenly discern through the veil a charm, a legendary fascination in their deep-gemmed gorgeousness, which, although we have felt it and read of it before, we never seized till now.

The front windows were entirely muffled by draperies of rich orange damask, lined with white, and with a silvery sheen running through the pattern, while curtains of the same warm material, fell on each side the bay window, giving it the appearance of a tent, open, and yet, to a certain degree, secluded, for a fall of lace swept from the cornice, hanging like a veil of woven frost-work before the glass, rendering every thing beyond indistinct, but dreamily beautiful.