The day was indeed white, as white as three feet of snow and a cloudless St. Valentine’s sun could make it.  The eye could not look forth without blinking, or veiling itself with tears.  The patch of plowed ground on the top of the hill, where the wind had blown the snow away, was as welcome to it as water to a parched tongue.  It was the one refreshing oasis in this desert of dazzling light.  I sat down upon it to let the eye bathe and revel in it.  It took away the smart like a poultice.  For so gentle and on the whole so beneficent an element, the snow asserts itself very proudly.  It takes the world quickly and entirely to itself.  It makes no concessions or compromises, but rules despotically.  It baffles and bewilders the eye, and it returns the sun glare for glare.  Its coming in our winter climate is the hand of mercy to the earth and to everything in its bosom, but it is a barrier and an embargo to everything that moves above.

We toiled up the long steep hill, where only an occasional mullein-stalk or other tall weed stood above the snow.  Near the top the hill was girded with a bank of snow that blotted out the stone wall and every vestige of the earth beneath.  These hills wear this belt till May, and sometimes the plow pauses beside them.  From the top of the ridge an immense landscape in immaculate white stretches before us.  Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and padded by the stainless element, hang upon the sides of the mountains, or repose across the long sloping hills.  The fences or stone walls show like half-obliterated black lines.  I turn my back to the sun, or shade my eyes with my hand.  Every object or movement in the landscape is sharply revealed; one could see a fox half a league.  The farmer foddering his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or leading his horse to water; the pedestrian crossing the hill below; the children wending their way toward the distant schoolhouse,—­the eye cannot help but note them:  they are black specks upon square miles of luminous white.  What a multitude of sins this unstinted charity of the snow covers!  How it flatters the ground!  Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would never suspect that that gentle slope with its pretty dimples and curves was not the smoothest of meadows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone.

But what is that black speck creeping across that cleared field near the top of the mountain at the head of the valley, three quarters of a mile away?  It is like a fly moving across an illuminated surface.  A distant mellow bay floats to us, and we know it is the hound.  He picked up the trail of the fox half an hour since, where he had crossed the ridge early in the morning, and now he has routed him and Reynard is steering for the Big Mountain.  We press on and attain the shoulder of the range, where we strike a trail two or three days old of some former hunters, which leads us into the woods along the side of the mountain.  We are on the first plateau before