faithful work, has more than a thousand photographs of these crystals,
no two alike. Every storm yields him a new set of pictures.

* * * * *

For a little while the snow grows damp and the flakes grow larger,
making downy blankets for the babes in the woods--the hepaticas, the
mosses, the ferns. The catkins of the hazelbrush are edged with white.
The slender stems of the meadow-sweet begin to droop beneath the
weight of the snow. The delicate yellow pointed buds of the wild
gooseberry look like topaz gems in a setting of white pearl. The snow
falls faster and the wood becomes a ghost world. The dull red torches
of the smooth sumac are extinguished. The fine, delicate spray of the
hop hornbeam is a fairy net whose every mesh is fringed with
immaculate beauty. The little clusters of fine twigs here and there in
the hackberry grow into spheres of fleecy fruit. The snow sticks to
the tree trunks and makes a compass out of every one, a more accurate
compass than the big radical leaves of the rosin weed in the early
fall.

As the day darkens the ghost-like effect of the storm in the woods is
all the more marked. The trees stand like silent specters, and at
every turn in the path you come upon strange shadow shapes of shrub
and bush. The snow is piling high under the hazelbrush and the sumac,
stumps of trees become soft white mounds, and the little brook has
curving banks of beauty.

There is a thrill and an exaltation in such a storm. The depressing
influences of the earlier day are no more. As you resolutely walk
homeward through the storm and the deep snow, you feel the heart grow