soundlessness seems desecration. It is supreme, infinite, absolute; you, the living, moving onlooker, are finite and relative, a thing of time and space. To think is to disturb the serenity of its repose, for to think is to attempt to limit it, to reduce it to the level of yourself, and no thought is large enough to compass it. Only some shaggy elk, hoofed and horned, diabolically crashing through crust upon crust of superimposed layers of frozen snow; and only demoniacal little troops of wolves, pattering fiendishly, are fit to defy or to disturb this deity of Quiet. It is large, expansive, in its influence. Summer sights and sounds bind you to a spot, limit your attention to a locality, accentuate the petty, the individual, the trivial. The wintry woods, the white unfurrowed fields, stimulate no sense. The soul of man seems bared to the soul of Nature, and human thought and the universal mind seem contiguous and conterminous.—Silence affects the mind as darkness affects the senses: both in their impressiveness quicken the faculties to the utmost; and yet, as no sense can perceive the impalpability of darkness, so no thought can pierce the impenetrability of silence.—One must visit a wintry clime to experience emotions such as these.

As I walked, the wind rose, and its noise in the convolutions of the ear, so still was everything else, became almost annoying in its resounding roar. I had followed devious and untravelled ways in the semi-darkness, and this wind it was that told me when again I reached a high-road—namely, by the whistling of the telegraph wires. I never heard such obstreperous wires. They made an Æolian harp truly hyperborean in timbre and volume. Every note in the scale of audible human sound seemed struck; and were there such a thing as an acoustical spectroscope, it would have shown, not only every tone and semitone in the gamut, but ultra-treble and infra-bass notes also. And it was played fortissimo. Those wires shrieked, bellowed. Whether at that early hour they were carrying messages, I do not know; but all the intensity of human anguish, human happiness, and human woe seemed to be flowing through their scrannel lengths; and the thin hapless things plained of their freight to the unheeding winds. It was a weird sound far out there in the desolate wild, with not a soul to hear or sympathise—for I, what was I in all that huge expanse? They wotted not of me.

Then the great sky by degrees broke up into masses of cloud, and here and there between them shone out the steady stars—imperturbable, piercing, shaken not by the slightest twinkle. One rich and brilliant planet in the west glowed argent in the blue—a blue into which the eye penetrated far, far into infinity. The Canadian sky is ever lofty, pellucid, profound; very different from the close canopy so common in cloudy England.

But it was high time to turn homewards. A faint light overspread the east; things began to take shape; houses, instead of appearing as dark blotches against the white, now looked like habitable dwellings; the separate boughs were distinguishable on the trees. As one neared the town signs of life were seen—and smelled; the pungent odour of the "coal-oil" with which the impatient and unthrifty housewife coaxed her wood fire more rapidly to catch, smote almost smartingly upon the nostril. Sleepy-eyed mechanics, buttoned to the throat, heavily "overshoed," and with hands bepocketed, strode sullenly workwards. Later on "cutters"—so are called the comfortable little one-horsed sleighs just seating a couple—sped hither and thither. Then a milk-cart or two glided past, the cans wrapped in furs, the hairs on the horses' muzzles showing white with cleaving ice. Later still, and when within the precincts of the town proper, children were met espying sleighs on which to get "rides" to school. It was a different world now. A dazzling sun transformed the dull dead landscape of the night into a blinding spangled sheet of purest white. Involuntarily the eyes half closed against that glare. No wonder the sub-Arctic eye lacks the large frank openness of those of softer realms; against even the summer sunshine the protection of approximated eyelids is needed, as the crow's-feet of the farmers' features prove. If Canada has earned the title of Our Lady of the Snows, she certainly equally deserves the title of Our Lady of the Sunshine; nowhere is sunshine so bright or so abundant; so bright and abundant that it is not unreasonable to suppose that it has not a little to do with the elimination of that "phlegm" from the descendants of the immigrant of that land to the folk of which the French attribute that characteristic. "There are few, if any, places in England," says the Director of the Meteorological Service of Canada, "that have a larger normal annual percentage [of bright sunshine] than thirty-six, and there are many as low as twenty-five; whereas in Canada most stations exceed forty, and some few have as high a percentage as forty-six."[12] "Weather permitting" is a phrase but rarely heard in Canada.

But my early morning walk was over. It was one I would not have exchanged for many another taken under more genial skies.