"There are about seven hundred barrels of flour in town; it is admitted
that fresh meat is getting scarce; the streets are almost impassable
from the snow-drifts.

"K. and I have hit upon a plan for killing time. We are learning
poetry--she takes twenty lines of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' and I twenty
lines of the 'Deserted Village.' It will take us twenty days to learn
the whole, and we hope to be stopped in our course by the opening of the
harbor. Considering that K. has a fiancé from whom she cannot hear a
word, she carries herself very amicably towards mankind. She is making
herself a pair of shoes, which look very well; I have made myself a
morning-dress since we were closed in.

"Last night I took my first lesson in whist-playing. I learned in one
evening to know the king, queen, and jack apart, and to understand what
my partner meant when she winked at me.

"The worst of this condition of things is that we shall bear the marks
of it all our lives. We are now sixteen daily papers behind the rest of
the world, and in those sixteen papers are items known to all the people
in all the cities, which will never be known to us. How prices have
fluctuated in that time we shall not know--what houses have burned down,
what robberies have been committed. When the papers do come, each of us
will rush for the latest dates; the news of two weeks ago is now
history, and no one reads history, especially the history of one's own
country.

"I bought a copy of 'Aurora Leigh' just before the freezing up, and I
have been careful, as it is the only copy on the island, to circulate it