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Here the air is cool and bracing a breeze ever blowing, hoar-frost on the grass, and ice on the water in the winter what a blessed change does it present from the blazing sun and hot sultry air of the sea-coast. It can be reached, too, from Colombo by a capital road of less than a hundred miles in length. I wonder people do not resort to it for their health from all parts of India.
The winter drew on. But first November came, with its 'saint Martin's summer, halcyon days' and the old man revived a little. He stood one morning and looked from his window on the garden behind the house, all glittering with molten hoar-frost. A few leaves, golden with death, hung here and there on a naked bough. A kind of sigh was in the air.
Frost the old Norse Seer discerns to be a monstrous hoary Jotun, the Giant Thrym, Hrym; or Rime, the old word now nearly obsolete here, but still used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jotun or Devil; the monstrous Jotun Rime drove home his Horses at night, sat "combing their manes," which Horses were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost-Winds.
But shortly after they had passed the southern tropic, as they neared the Cape, the climate changed suddenly, with so swift an alteration that from sultry heat of a torrid summer they plunged almost directly into the biting cold of winter. As they doubled the Cape a strong north-west gale met them, with icy cold in its blast. The ropes were frozen, and the sails grew stiff with hoar-frost.
His eyes were on the surrounding forest, and the white gossamer of the hoar-frost clinging to the dark foliage. He dared not trust himself to reply. Again came the missionary's quiet laugh. "I wonder," he said. Then, in a moment, a curious flicker marred the calm of his eyes. "Bat, old friend," he went on, after a pause, "there's just one thing I'm going to ask you before I pull out.
The sun catching the hoar-frost on the frozen soil turned the world to crystal, and in every field were little shallows of blue light; the St. Dreot Woods were deep black with flickering golden stars. She tried to speak. She could not. Tears were in her eyes. "It is so long ... since I ... London," she smiled at Maggie.
It was now nearly eight o'clock. The night was pitch-dark, the sky star-studded and moonless. It was freezing hard, the keen air stung our faces, the tiniest twig was finger-thick with hoar-frost, and the grass crunched under our feet at every step.
The last day of his stay in London arrived; he rose with a sense of some awful doom hanging over him that he could in nowise shake off. It was a strange day, too the world of London vaguely shining through a pale fog, the sun a globe of red fire. There was hoar-frost on the window-ledges; at last the winter seemed about to begin.
We ride for an hour or so with coats tightly buttoned up, blue noses, and frozen fingers for the hoar-frost still lingers on the ground but the air is delightfully exhilarating, and we know that we shall not have to complain of the cold long. By degrees the sun makes itself felt, and we discard first one wrap and then another, till by ten o'clock even light overcoats are not required.
Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head; the "handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the critics have discovered, are Icebergs.
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