through the dense obscurity, and then he turned off on another road.  At first I hailed one and another in the black cavern of the rockaway behind me, and their muffled voices would answer, “All right.”  But one after another they ceased to answer me until all were fast asleep except my wife.  She insisted that she was only very drowsy, but I knew that she was also very, very tired.  Indeed, I felt myself, in a way that frightened me, the strange desire to sleep that overcomes those long exposed to cold and wind.

I must have been nodding and swaying around rather loosely, when I felt myself going heels over head into the snow.  As I picked myself up I heard my wife and children screaming, and John Jones shouting to his horses, “Git up,” while at the same time he lashed them with his whip.  My face was so plastered with snow that I could see only a dark object which was evidently being dragged violently out of a ditch, for when the level road was reached, Mr. Jones shouted, “Whoa!”

“Robert, are you hurt?” cried my wife.

“No, are you?”

“Not a bit, but I’m frightened to death.”

Then John Jones gave a hearty guffaw and said: 

“I bet you our old shanghai rooster that you don’t die.”

“Take you up,” answered my wife, half laughing and half crying.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I’m here.  Haven’t the remotest idea where you be,” replied Mr. Jones.

“You are a philosopher,” I said, groping my way through the storm toward his voice.

“I believe I was a big fool for tryin’ to get home such a night as this; but now that we’ve set about it, we’d better get there.  That’s right.  Scramble in and take the reins.  Here’s my mittens.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to ’light and smell out the road.  This is equal to any blizzard I’ve read of out West.”

“How far have we to go now?”

“Half a mile, as nigh as I can make out;” and we jogged on again.

“Are you sure you are not hurt?” Mousie asked me.

“Sure; it was like tumbling into a feather bed.”

“Stop a bit,” cried Mr. Jones.  “There’s a turn in the road here.  Let me go on a little and lay out your course.”

“Oh, I wish we had stayed anywhere under shelter,” said my wife.

“Courage,” I cried.  “When we get home, we’ll laugh over this.”

“Now,” shouted Mr. Jones, “veer gradually off to the left toward my voice—­all right;” and we jogged on again, stopping from time to time to let our invisible guide explore the road.

Once more he cried, “Stop a minute.”

The wind roared and shrieked around us, and it was growing colder.  With a chill of fear I thought, “Could John Jones have mistaken the road?” and I remembered how four people and a pair of horses had been frozen within a few yards of a house in a Western snow-storm.

“Are you cold, children?” I asked.