Maria Chapdelaine

kes sifting lazily from the skies. The ground was covered, the trees white; v

eclared, and I believe it myself." He was right; for in two days a rain carried off the snow and the dark soil again lay bare. Still the wa

, went round the outside of the house, nailing up, closing chinks, remedying as best they could the year's wear and tear. Within, the women forced rags into the crevices,

rder of the forest plenty of dead trees yet were standing. Esdras and Legare took ax in hand and felled for thr

eatre, mounting to loftier heights-an amphitheatre trending in a vast curve to the northward. Of the birches, aspens, alders and wild cherries scattered upon the slope, October made splashes of many-tinted red and gold. Throughout these weeks the ruddy brown of mosses, the changeless green of fir and cypress, were no more than a background, a setting only fo

es, brown, red and golden, shaken too unkindly, strow the ground; the snow covers them, and the white expanse has only for adornment the sombre green

ble-handed saw and sawed, sawed, sawed from morning till night; it was then the turn of the axes, and the logs were split as their size required. Nothing remained but to cord the split wood in the shed beside the house, where it was sheltered from the snow; the huge

into the brine-tub; from a beam in the shed there hung the side of a fat heifer-the other half sold to people in Honfleur-which the cold would keep fresh

rt and one must:-not lose a single hour of those precious weeks when it is possible to work on

the family fetched a couple of logs from under the staircase; cypress in the morning, spruce throughout the day, in the evening birch, pushing them in upon the live coals. Whenever the heat failed

should, unluckily, the fire be out he lost no time in rekindling it with birch-bark and cypress branches, placed heavier pieces on the mount

the little square windows. And sometimes this world was strangely beautiful in its frozen immobility, with a sky of flawless blue and a bril

in the morning the sky was clear again, but the fierce northwest wind swayed the heavens. Powdery snow, whipped from the ground, drove across the burnt lands and the clearings in blinding squalls, and heaped itself behind whatever broke the forc

d shining-wet with snow-crystals melted by the heat of the house. Chapdelaine would pluck the icicles from his moustache, slowly draw off his shee

smoking pipes innumerable while the women-folk are busy with the evening meal. The cold snaps the nails in the plank walls with report

" thinks Maria to herself; and then

ther. "Up there where the trees stand close together one does not f

es

as and Da'Be that she