but even from that distance I could see that poor Mr. U---'s head
was bandaged up, and as soon as I got near enough to hear, F---
shouted "I have broken my neck!" adding, "I am very hungry: let us
go in to supper."

Under the circumstances these words were consolatory; and when I
came to hear the story, this was the way the accident happened. As
I mentioned before, even this drift had thawed till it was soft at
the surface and worn away almost to the rocks. During a rapid
descent the nose of the sledge dipped through the snow, and stopped
dead against a rock. Mr. U--- was instantly buried in the snow,
falling into a young but prickly Spaniard, which assaulted him
grievously; but F--- shot over his head some ten yards, turned a
somersault, and alit on his feet. This sounds a harmless
performance enough, but it requires practice; and F--- declared that
for weeks afterwards his neck felt twisted. The accident must have
looked very ridiculous: the sledge one moment gliding smoothly along
at the rate of forty miles an hour,--the next a dead stop, and F---
flying through the air over his passenger's head, finishing feet
first plump down in the soft snow.

Looking back on that time, I can remember how curiously soon the
external traces of the great snow-storm disappeared. For some weeks
after the friendly nor-wester, the air of the whole neighbourhood
was tainted by dead and decaying sheep and lambs; and the wire
fences, stock-yard rails, and every "coign of vantage," had to be
made useful but ghastly by a tapestry of sheep-skins. The only
wonder was that a single sheep had survived a storm severe enough to
kill wild pigs. Great boars, cased in hides an inch thick, had
perished through sheer stress of weather; while thin-skinned