there is always the pleasant time ahead when it will be suitable to take
them out and look at them. The man did not finger his birds as a boy
might have done his marbles, but he did not forget them, and every now
and then he lifted the flaps of the, baggy pockets to refill them with
air.

He was tramping fast now down the trough of the little valley, under
trees that, though leafless, were thick enough to shut out the
surrounding landscape. The pencils of the evening sunlight, it is true,
found their way all over the rounded snow-ground, but the sunset was
hidden by the branches about him, and nothing but the snow and the tree
trunks was forced upon his eye, except now and then a bit of blue seen
through the branches--a blue that had lost much depth of colour with the
decline of day, and come nearer earth--a pale cold blue that showed
exquisite tenderness of contrast as seen through the dove-coloured grey
of maple boughs.

Where the valley dipped under water and the lake in the midst of the
hills had its shore, Trenholme came out from under the trees. The sun
had set. The plain of the ice and the snowclad hills looked blue with
cold--unutterably cold, and dead as lightless snow looks when the eye
has grown accustomed to see it animated with light. He could not see
where, beneath the snow, the land ended and the ice began; but it
mattered little. He walked out on the white plain scanning the
south-eastern hill-slope for the house toward which he intended to bend
his steps. He was well out on the lake before he saw far enough round
the first cliff to come in sight of the log house and its clearing, and
no sooner did he see it than he heard his approach, although he was yet
so far away, heralded by the barking of a dog. Before he had gone much
farther a man came forth with a dog to meet him.