Great Possessions

weather and wind; Give me

ill on my cheeks, And the

ch

of open, snow-clad country. I slipped in the ruts of the roads or ploughed thro

ay fell bright and cold with snow lying fine and crumbly like sugar. To the east of

crunch upon the road as the early farmers go by with milk for the creamery-the frosty breath of each driver fluttering aside like a white scarf. Through the still air ordinary voices cut sharply and clearly, and a laugh bounds out across the open country with a kind of superabundance of joy. I see two men beating their arms as they follow their wood sled. They are bantering one another noisily. I see a man shovelling snow from his barn doors; as each shovelful rises and scatters, the

nter! Not all winter, but just win

rows; cheeks red and crusty, so that to wrinkle them hurts: but all the body within aglow with warmth and health. Twice the ordinary

your friend it is a sorrow and a heaviness. Even to you it is not always alike. Though the world itself is the same to-day as it was yesterday and will be to-morrow-th

o sad for them. What is there to offer one who cannot respond gladly to the beauty of the fields, or opens his heart widely to the beckoning of friends? And we ask ourselves: H

ugh her with the sharpness of knives. The path to the hen-house is a kind of via dolorosa, a terror of slipperiness and cold. She might avoid it: her son, worthless as he is, might do it for her, but she clings to it as she clings to

ich is more painful even than the Terror of the Known: those Tyrannies of Habit and of Place which so often and so ruthlessly rule the lives of the old. She clings desperately to the few people she knows ("'t

n slightly. He is a man of education and has been "well-off" in the country sense, is still, so far as I know, but he has a sardonic outlook upon life. He is discouraged about human nature. Thinks that po

n the town road I

morn

, to my surpr

you h

or some time whether I was

now; why d

estioning, and I though

a man be happy?

that!" he responded, "Why sho

onward with a kind

is voice as he said, "Look at the world!" Gloomy and bl

ancy that stopped me where I stood. Was I, then, all wrong about the world? I actually had a kind of fear lest when I

e world!" I

was. There were the hills and the fields and the great still trees-and the open sky above. And even as I looked down the road and saw my sardonic old friend plodding through the snow-his very back frowning-I

t the

look