snow was fearful.

Hailstones strike, harass, bruise, stun, crush. Snowflakes do worse:
soft and inexorable, the snowflake does its work in silence; touch it,
and it melts. It is pure, even as the hypocrite is candid. It is by
white particles slowly heaped upon each other that the flake becomes an
avalanche and the knave a criminal.

The child continued to advance into the mist. The fog presents but a
soft obstacle; hence its danger. It yields, and yet persists. Mist, like
snow, is full of treachery. The child, strange wrestler at war with all
these risks, had succeeded in reaching the bottom of the descent, and
had gained Chesil. Without knowing it he was on an isthmus, with the
ocean on each side; so that he could not lose his way in the fog, in the
snow, or in the darkness, without falling into the deep waters of the
gulf on the right hand, or into the raging billows of the high sea on
the left. He was travelling on, in ignorance, between these two abysses.

The Isthmus of Portland was at this period singularly sharp and rugged.
Nothing remains at this date of its past configuration. Since the idea
of manufacturing Portland stone into Roman cement was first seized, the
whole rock has been subjected to an alteration which has completely
changed its original appearance. Calcareous lias, slate, and trap are
still to be found there, rising from layers of conglomerate, like teeth
from a gum; but the pickaxe has broken up and levelled those bristling,
rugged peaks which were once the fearful perches of the ossifrage. The
summits exist no longer where the labbes and the skua gulls used to
flock together, soaring, like the envious, to sully high places. In vain
might you seek the tall monolith called Godolphin, an old British word,
signifying "white eagle." In summer you may still gather on those