tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/> SINCE the unknown day of the first unknown snowbank, the earth has made no revolution, has not once turned over from side to side without keeping undeviatingly in the straight road toward the fulfilment of that epitaph, Time’s epitaph. Never since then, though fighting with all its fires, has it been able to drive off that pallid visitant from outer space, never has it been able to prevent the persistent return of that appalling stranger. For the little white spot would not out, would not out for good. If it disappeared in one place, it reappeared in another place. And it invariably brought along more of its kind: each visitant seemed to bring a mate, a family, a tribe. In the blossoming zones of the earth’s surface where we spend our dream-life of pain and joy, if a solitary bee find its way to a new field in spring, the summer will be likely to bring the swarm. If a migratory bird by some deviation of route alight on a strange continent or island, the species may some day cover that continent or island. And those first downward flights from the clouds began to be followed by other flights, by vaster flocks and flights. And the earth began to have a new trouble.

She, our very human Mother, had from the first had enough troubles of her own, as without exception we her very human children have had enough of ours. Sometimes her stories had begun well but each of them as it ended ended badly. As we now look back upon any one of these finished stories of hers, we may derive some satisfaction from seeing that it possessed the art, the logic, of being inevitable. But that will be our only joy. Her great novels, her great epics, have uniformly been stupendous, immeasurable cataclysms, earth-tragedies. But among them all not one has possessed the awful beauty, the chaste splendor, the universality, of this new trouble of hers with the tiny crystal.

We are well accustomed as we look out upon Nature at close range to see great creatures harrassed by little creatures. The lot of each big one seems to be in the keeping of some little one, which never quits it, nags it, stings it, wears it out, drives it desperate, makes life somewhat a burden to it and death somewhat a relief. But no one of us has ever seen so huge and powerful a thing as a whole round world pitilessly stalked from age to age, run down, overcome inch by inch, routed out of a fair destiny by such a mite of a tormentor as a crystal. Nowhere have we witnessed so disproportionate a conflict as that between a sphere and a snowflake.

Why, some wintry day when you in overcoat and gloves are tramping comfortably across your fields on which snow is falling, stop and draw off one of your gloves, and holding out your hand, catch one of these little terrors, one of these dread arrows from the unseen quiver of all whiteness. Intercept it in its passage towards the earth and let it strike you, strike your palm, instead of striking the Mother who has been struck so often. One instant after it has reached your palm it has dropped its disguise and has turned into its old familiar self, a raindrop, a drop of dew. That is, under the influence of the warmth of your planetary fire, it has returned to its youth. For snow is the old age of water. Cloud, mist, rain, dew—these all are young: their old age is ice. When a dewdrop arranges itself for perpetuity, disposes itself in orderly fashion never to change again, stretches itself out in its rigor mortis, it has become a crystal. It has given up the ghost and has become a ghost—it has become snow, the ghost of the brook, the ghost of the rain.

Now this—just this—was the Earth’s new trouble; and this ever since has been her increasing trouble and her