not a fence or gate could be seen in all the country side. Here and
there a long wave-like line in the smooth mass would lead us to
suppose that a wire fence lay buried beneath its curves, but we had
no means of knowing for certain. Near the house every shrub and
out-building, every hay-stack or wood-heap, had all been covered up,
and no man might even guess where they lay.

This had been the terrible state of things, and although the blessed
warm wind had removed our immediate and pressing fear of starvation,
we could not hope to employ ourselves in searching for our missing
sheep for many days to come. None of us had been able to take any
exercise for more than a fortnight, and having done all that could
possibly be done near at hand, F--- set to work to manufacture some
sledges out of old packing-cases. Quite close to the house, a hill
sloped smoothly for about 300 yards, at an angle of 40 degrees;
along its side lay a perfectly level and deep drift, which did not
show any signs of thawing for more than a month, and we resolved to
use this as a natural _Montagne Russe_. The construction of a
suitable sledge was the first difficulty to be surmounted, and many
were the dismal failures and break-neck catastrophes which preceded
what we considered a safe and successful vehicle. Not only was it
immensely difficult to make, without either proper materials or
tools, a sledge which could hold two people (for F--- declared it
was no fun sleighing alone), but his "patent brakes" proved the most
broken of reeds to lean upon when the sledge was dashing down the
steep incline at the rate of a thousand miles an hour.

We nearly broke our necks more than once, and I look back now with
amazement to our fool-hardiness. How well I remember one
expedition, when F---, who had been hammering away in a shed all the