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It grew dark and bitterly cold. No birds were flying, and I had stood up a moment to let the blood down into half-frozen toes, when a shadow seemed to pass over my head. The next moment there was a splash, followed by loud quacks of alarm from the decoy. All I could make out, in the obscurity under the ridge, was a flutter of wings that rose heavily from the water, taking my duck with them.
His face was covered with sweat and his horse with lather, the lapel of his coat was torn, his breeches and boots were covered with half-frozen mud. But having brought his horse to a halt, he swung himself out of the saddle with the brisk air of a boy who has enjoyed his first ride across country.
In shaded places of the valley you may walk through larches and leafless alder thickets by silent farms, all silvered over with hoar spangles fairy forests, where the flowers and foliage are rime. The streams are flowing half-frozen over rocks sheeted with opaque green ice.
I think he knew he wouldn't get through, and it was only because of the woman he held on so tight." Seaforth shivered a little, as his fancy called up the scene. The starving man crouching half-frozen with the paddle clenched in stiffened fingers had watched those trees slide by him, knowing that on their speed depended his fast-failing chance of life.
But the magnet shows this tracery to be iron. We were shown also emeralds and "diamonds," picked up in this region, and there is a mild expectation in all the inhabitants of great mineral treasure. A singular product of the region is the flexible sandstone. It is a most uncanny stone. A slip of it a couple of feet long and an inch in diameter each way bends in the hand like a half-frozen snake.
I had given it up in despair, and, half-frozen with cold, was stepping into the cutter to take the benefit of the old bull's hide, when, fortunately for the music master one of the strings of the lost instrument snapped with the cold. We followed the direction of the sound, and soon beheld the poor fiddle sticking in a snow-bank, and concealed by a projecting stump.
Nor was it till the next day that a half-frozen little girl, who was heard crying in the snow in front of a neighbor's house, disclosed the secret that Uncle Rube was missing. How had they known at all that there were seals on the ice that day? Known? Why, Mark Seaforth had gone all along the coast telling them early in the morning.
The guesses were various; but no one thought of the possible arrival of a stranger at such an hour on such a night, until Serena suggested that it would be a good plan to open the door. Then the unbidden guest was discovered lying benumbed along the threshold. There was no want of knowledge as to what should be done with a half-frozen man, and no lack of ready hands to do it.
In the confusion consequent on a battle matters will be ten times worse. In the morning the troops will be half-starved and half-frozen, and there will be very little fight left in them." "What would you do if you were commander-in-chief, Cuthbert?"
The air was thick with a fine powder that filled her eyes and nostrils, the wind buffeted her, and there was an awful cold the cold that taxes the utmost strength of mind and body of those who are forced to face it on the shelterless prairie. Still the girl struggled on, feeling with half-frozen feet for the depression of the trail, and grappling with a horrible dismay when she failed to find it.
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