apparently unfounded hope that I tell it—­if I did not add, that, in the morning, his wife gave him a letter which their common trouble of yesterday had made her forget, and which had lain with its black border all night in the darkness unopened, waiting to tell him how the vanished friend had not forgotten him on her death-bed, but had left him enough to take him out of all those difficulties, and give him strength and time to do far better work than the book which had failed of birth.—­Some of my readers may doubt whether I am more than “a wandering voice,” but whatever I am, or may be thought to be, my friend’s story is true.

And all this has come out of the winter that I, in the retrospect of my history, am looking forward to.  It came, with its fogs, and dripping boughs, and sodden paths, and rotting leaves, and rains, and skies of weary gray; but also with its fierce red suns, shining aslant upon sheets of manna-like hoarfrost, and delicate ice-films over prisoned waters, and those white falling chaoses of perfect forms—­called snow-storms—­those confusions confounded of infinite symmetries.

And when the hard frost came, it brought a friend to my door.  It was Mr Stoddart.

He entered my room with something of the countenance Naaman must have borne, after his flesh had come again like unto the flesh of a little child.  He did not look ashamed, but his pale face looked humble and distressed.  Its somewhat self-satisfied placidity had vanished, and instead of the diffused geniality which was its usual expression, it now showed traces of feeling as well as plain signs of suffering.  I gave him as warm a welcome as I could, and having seated him comfortably by the fire, and found that he would take no refreshment, began to chat about the day’s news, for I had just been reading the newspaper.  But he showed no interest beyond what the merest politeness required.  I would try something else.

“The cold weather, which makes so many invalids creep into bed, seems to have brought you out into the air, Mr Stoddart,” I said.

“It has revived me, certainly.”

“Indeed, one must believe that winter and cold are as beneficent, though not so genial, as summer and its warmth.  Winter kills many a disease and many a noxious influence.  And what is it to have the fresh green leaves of spring instead of the everlasting brown of some countries which have no winter!”

I talked thus, hoping to rouse him to conversation, and I was successful.

“I feel just as if I were coming out of a winter.  Don’t you think illness is a kind of human winter?”

“Certainly—­more or less stormy.  With some a winter of snow and hail and piercing winds; with others of black frosts and creeping fogs, with now and then a glimmer of the sun.”

“The last is more like mine.  I feel as if I had been in a wet hole in the earth.”

“And many a man,” I went on, “the foliage of whose character had been turning brown and seared and dry, rattling rather than rustling in the faint hot wind of even fortunes, has come out of the winter of a weary illness with the fresh delicate buds of a new life bursting from the sun-dried bark.”