The fuel in the stoves was replenished, and quite a large space was cleared to the leeward of the locomotive, where a fire was built from the neighboring fences, so that in an hour’s time from the finding of the poultry the entire body of passengers were busy picking the bones of roasted and broiled fowls.  It was not so bad a dinner!  To be sure, it was rather chilly, now and then, when the opening of a car-door, to let in a half-frozen gentleman with a half-cooked chicken in his hand, admitted with him a snow-laden blast from without; and then the viands were not served a la Soyer, but there was an appetite for sauce and a certain gypsy-like feeling of being at a picnic that served as a relish.  And so, in the year of our Lord 18—­, two hundred strangers sat down together at a most extraordinary Thanksgiving-dinner, of which no account has hitherto been published, if I except a vote of thanks, “together with an exceedingly chaste and richly chased silver goblet,” (so the newspaper description read,) which were presented to the conductor by “the surviving passengers,” after he had procured help and rescued them from their perplexing predicament.

But dinners end.  Twelve o’clock came, and still the snow was falling thick and fast, and still the white plain about them mounted slowly and surely towards the skies.  Then the passengers became yet more weary and unhappy.  Old Woollen, the unfortunate, detailed his woes to more and more appreciative audiences.  Even the Funny Man—­with a fresh flask of whiskey—­sighed almost dismally between frequent uneasy “cat-naps.”  And Samson Newell, first seeing his wife comfortably settled, and his little ones safely disposed about her, strode up and down, from car to car, with a gloom of disappointment on his face that was almost ferocious.  “Too bad!” he muttered, “too bad! too bad! too bad!”

One o’clock came, and the snow held up!  At first the passengers noticed that the flakes fell less thickly.  Then, gradually and ever slowly decreasing, they finally ceased falling altogether.  The clouds drifted from before the face of the heavens, and the sun came out.  It shone over a broad surface of glistening snow, with here and there a fence-post obtruding into notice, but otherwhere a cold, blank expanse of whiteness.  One or two remote farm-houses, with blue smoke rising in thin, straight columns from their chimneys, a wide stretch of woodland to the right, distant hills bounding all the prospect,—­and everywhere snow.  No fences, no roads, no paths,—­but only snow!

The passengers gazed out of the windows or stood upon the platforms,—­drawn thither by the warmth of the sun,—­with feelings almost akin to despair.  Presently it was proposed to make for the farm-houses, and fifteen of the more adventurous started.  A few struggled through and arrived in something over an hour at the nearest house, wet to the skin with melted snow, and too much fatigued to think of returning,—­but most of them gave out at the end of the first half-mile, and came back to the train.