history--but let it be. We have had enough sad stories for to-day."

Those other things, as I had called them, were a withered rose in a little
cardboard box, and a miniature of a lady in a purple morocco case.




5


It so happened that the Winter this year was unusually severe, not only at
Bruehl and the parts about Cologne, but throughout all the Rhine country.
Heavy snows fell at Christmas and lay unmelted for weeks upon the ground.
Long forgotten sleighs were dragged out from their hiding places and put
upon the road, not only for the transport of goods, but for the conveyance
of passengers. The ponds in every direction and all the smaller streams
were fast frozen. Great masses of dirty ice, too, came floating down the
Rhine, and there were rumours of the great river being quite frozen over
somewhere up in Switzerland, many hundred miles nearer its source.

For myself, I enjoyed it all--the bitter cold, the short days, the rapid
exercise, the blazing fires within, and the glittering snow without. I
made snow-men and snow-castles to my heart's content. I learned to skate
with my father on the frozen ponds. I was never weary of admiring the
wintry landscape--the wide plains sheeted with silver; the purple
mountains peeping through brown vistas of bare forest; the nearer trees
standing out in featherlike tracery against the blue-green sky. To me it
was all beautiful; even more beautiful than in the radiant summertime.