shelter from the growing gale. Blankets we had none; night was upon us.—We decided to walk.

On the left was this rolling Georgian ocean, seemingly illimitable. In its northern stretches it reached up to Hudson's Bay, to the Arctic; and by its southern streams it drave down to Lake Ontario, to the St Lawrence, to the Atlantic. It was one with this Atlantic; it was one with the Pacific; it was first cousin to the Indian Ocean, and but once or twice removed from all the waters of the world, since they and it had a common origin.

The walking was superb. The sand was firm as asphalt: on the right was dimly visible a friendly fringe of trees—pine and scrub and brushwood; on the left there was ever that never-ceasing roll of waves—waves once more linking me with Ostend and Hove, Rotterdam and Rangoon, St John in New Brunswick, Ascension Isle, the Cape of Good Hope, and the palm-fringed coast of Malabar.

We walked. And we walked fast. But not too fast to notice. There was no moon. The stars came out, and in that pellucid northern air, where was no dust of road nor smoke of chimney, those stars shone as assuredly never can they shine elsewhere. It is a literal fact that, in order to determine whether or not the great luminous patches which I gazed at overhead were the veritable Milky Way or only drifting clouds lit up by starlight, I had to look again and again, and to take note as to whether there was perceptible any change of shape. There was not. It was the Galaxy itself; but so revealed, so clearly seen, so unremote, as it were, that once again the great portals of the Infinite seemed to open, and to permit a glimpse into the mysterious abode of Being—inadequate term by which we feebly connote the supreme unity of all that is. To permit a glimpse, too, into that puzzle of puzzles, the not impossible identification or unification or intussusception of that All with the smallest of its integral contents. For was not that assemblage of suns—those masses of solar systems, so numerous as to seem but a mist—was it not actually depicted on the tiny retina of the eye? It was; and, through this depicture, it was, as it were, intellectually embraced in the thinking mind behind; a fact symbolical of the truth, as yet but dimly comprehended, that in very deed the infinitesimal unit and the mighty All are one and identical.

However, ontological speculations under an autumnal sky have their limit; and glad indeed were we, after long search among the pines and the hemlocks, to find, albeit it was late, a hostel in which were warmth and shelter for the night.

XIII
Winter in Canada

§ 18

I remember me, too, of a notable winter's walk in Canada.

For some reason, one night in mid-January, Sleep forsook me. After wooing her in vain, I rose at three and lighted an ungainly but highly satisfactory stove. It had a draught like a Bessemer furnace, drawing through an ugly stove-pipe which ran bolt upright, turned sharp before it reached the ceiling, and disappeared in a hole in the wall—an apparatus quite the most conspicuous article of furniture in the room (it was in a hotel). On this I warmed a cup of tea, then donned all the warm clothing I could find; and in some forty minutes was afoot.

My point of departure was a little Ontarian country town of some ten thousand inhabitants—we will call it Dummer. Dummer stood in a slightly higher latitude than the parallels which run through the belt of country skirting the northern shore of the Great Lakes, along which are dotted most of the centres of population; and accordingly it was exposed to a slightly severer wintry climate. At the time of my visit it was enveloped in snow. Snow lay deep over the whole land, thick on every roof, over the edges of which it protruded itself in irregular curves—solid cataracts suspended in air, and vainly endeavouring to complete their descent by long six-foot icicles. Snow-white was every road, save for the two dirty grooves beaten down by the hoofs of horses. Snow covered the country, far as the eye could reach; glistening like glaciers on the hill-sides, deep purple and blue in the patches shaded by the pines; only the woods showing black against the dazzling white, the perpendicular walls of the wooden farm buildings, the solitary trees and shrubs, and the straggling snake-fences—long, unshaped logs of split timber, their ends placed zigzag the one over the other, to keep the structure erect—relieved the white monotony. And yet this belt of country is almost in the same latitude with the south of France, with the Riviera, whence but a few days before I had received in a letter a violet!

When I started, there was no moon, there were no stars; my sole light was the skyey reflection of the electric lamps of the city; and only this for many miles enabled me to distinguish the grooves in which I had to walk from the high ridge of snow between them which I had to avoid. When I skirted the lee side of a high hill, or passed the distal edge of a thick wood, I floundered from one to other in the dark. The landscape, such of it as could be seen under a leaden-grey sky, was a vast monochrome, an expanse of dull white picked out with blotches and points and lines of black. Not a living thing was to be seen. Not a sound was to be heard. And, what particularly struck a lover of country walks, not the faintest suspicion of any kind of a scent was to be detected. Everything seemed to be dumb and dead; and the tiny flakes which fell in myriads, fell so silently, so pitilessly, had seemingly for their object the making of all things, if possible, still more dumb and dead.—There is always something poetic about snow in England. There is something playful and jocular in the way in which lusty standard rose-trees, stout shrubs, and sturdy hedges don aged Winter's garb, as a laughing maid will half demurely wear her grand-dam's cap. In the Western Hemisphere, away from the genial influences of the Gulf Stream, even in the same latitudes, winter is a more serious matter. The snow comes "to stay." There is little jocosity about it. It lies several feet thick. If it disappears during a temporary thaw, it comes again very soon. Here the trees do not sport with it. They put up with it. They stand knee-deep in it, leafless, motionless, scentless, soundless. If there is a wind, it sweeps through them with a long thin swish, like the wail of a host of lost spirits seeking shelter. Not a branch falls—the autumn blasts brought down all that was frangible. Only frozen tears fall, fall from the ice-encrusted twigs. For miles on either side of me stood these patient trees; thick, black, heavy-boughed cedars, their stout trunks buried in snow, squatting, like Mr Kipling's Djinn of All Deserts, on their haunches and vainly "thinking a Magic" to make idling Winter "hump himself"; beech-trees, naked but for a few scattered sere and yellow leaves fluttering about their waists; the drooping-branched elm, not half so graceful as when full-leafed; elegant maples with a tracery of twigs far too fine to be compared to lace. These trees formed often the outermost fringe of thick woods. Into these I penetrated. A profound silence pervaded them, a silence so intense, so all-embracing, it seemed to overflow the forest, to go out into space, to enwrap the world in its grasp. Not a thing stirs. To be alive in that shrine of death-like