Do any of you know how incredibly long winter seems in climates where for weeks together the thermometer stands at zero?  There is something hopeless in such cold.  You think of summer as of a thing read about somewhere in a book, but which has no actual existence.  Winter seems the only reality in the world.

Katy and Clover felt this hopelessness growing upon them as the days went on, and the weather became more and more severe.  Ten, twenty, even thirty degrees below zero, was no unusual register for the Hillsover thermometers.  Such cold half frightened them, but nobody else was frightened or surprised.  It was dry, brilliant cold.  The December snows lay unmelted on the ground in March, and the paths cut then were crisp and hard still, only the white walls on either side had risen higher and higher, till only a moving line of hoods and tippets was visible above them, when the school went out for its daily walk.  Morning after morning the girls woke to find thick crusts of frost on their window-panes, and every drop of water in the wash-bowl or pitcher turned to solid ice.  Night after night, Clover, who was a chilly little creature, lay shivering and unable to sleep, notwithstanding the hot bricks at her feet, and the many wraps which Katy piled upon her.  To Katy herself the cold was more bracing than depressing.  There was something in her blood which responded to the sharp tingle of frost, and she gained in strength in a remarkable way during this winter.  But the long storms told upon her spirits.  She pined for spring and home more than she liked to tell, and felt the need of variety in their monotonous life, where the creeping days appeared like weeks, and the weeks stretched themselves out, and seemed as long as months do in other places.

The girls resorted to all sorts of devices to keep themselves alive during this dreary season.  They had little epidemics of occupation.  At one time it was “spattering,” when all faces and fingers had a tendency to smudges of India ink; and there was hardly a fine comb or tooth-brush fit for use in the establishment.  Then a rage for tatting set in, followed by a fever of fancy-work, every one falling in love with the same pattern at the same time, and copying and recopying, till nobody could bear the sight of it.  At one time Clover counted eighteen girls all at work on the same bead and canvas pin-cushion.  Later there was a short period of decalcomanie; and then came the grand album craze, when thirty-three girls out of the thirty-nine sent for blank books bound in red morocco, and began to collect signatures and sentiments.  Here, also, there was a tendency toward repetition.

Sally Austin added to her autograph these lines of her own composition:—­

When on this page your beauteous eyes you bend,
Let it remind you of your absent friend. 
Sally J. Austin,
Galveston, Texas.

The girls found this sentiment charming, at least a dozen borrowed it, and in half the albums in the school you might read,—­