That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful
deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey
there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green
of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere. Intense light has the effect of
lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the
fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in
comparison with the blue beyond.

This was while he was in the open plain; but when he walked into the
forest, passing into the gap in the hills, all was changed. The snow,
lightly shadowed by the branches overhead, was more quiet to the sight,
and where his path lay near fir trees, the snow, where fell their heavy
shade, looked so dead and cold and grey that it recalled thoughts of
night-time, or of storm, or of other gloomy things; and this thought of
gloom, which the dense shadow brought, had fascination, because it was
such a wondrous contrast to the rest of the happy valley, in which the
sunbeams, now aslant, were giving a golden tinge to the icy facets of
crags, to high-perched circling drifts, to the basin of unbroken snow,
to the brown of maple trunks, and to the rich verdure of the very firs
which cast the shadow.

It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when he stopped his steady
tramp, arrested by the sight of the first living things he had seen--a
flock of birds upon a wild vine that, half snow-covered, hung out the
remnant of its frozen berries in a cleft of the hill. The birds did not
fly at his approach, and, going nearer and nearer on the silent snow, he
at last stopped, taking in greedily the sight of their pretty,
fluttering, life. They were rather large birds, large as the missel
thrush; they had thick curved beaks and were somewhat heavy in form; but
the plumage of the males was like the rose-tint of dawn or evening when