CHAPTER II.


With the night passed the storm which had rendered it so gloomy, and
the fair cold day shone upon a world shrouded in icy cerements; a
hushed, windless world, as full of glittering rime-runes as the
frozen fields of Jotunheim. Each tree and shrub seemed a springing
fountain, suddenly crystallized in mid-air, and not all the mediæval
marvels of Murano equalled the fairy fragile tracery of fine spun,
glassy web, and film, and fringe that stretched along fences, hung
from eaves, and belaced the ivy leaves that lay helpless on the
walls. A blanched waning moon, a mere silver crescent, shivered upon
the edge of the western horizon, fleeing before the scarlet and
orange lances that already bristled along the eastern sky-line, the
advance guard of the conqueror, who would ere many moments smite all
that weird icy realm with consuming flames. The very air seemed
frozen, and refused to vibrate in trills and roulades through the
throaty organs of matutinal birds, that hopped and blinked, plumed
their diamonded breasts, and scattered brilliants enough to set a
tiara; and profound silence brooded over the scene, until rudely
broken by a cry of dismay which rang out startlingly from the
parsonage. The alarm might very readily have been ascribed to
diligent Hannah, who, contemptuous of barometric or thermal
vicissitudes, invariably adhered to the aphorism of Solomon, and,
arising "while it is yet night, looketh well to the ways of her
household."