abatement, he wakened his companion-shepherd, telling him “it was come on such a night or morning as never blew from the heavens.”  The other at once arose, and, opening the door of the shed where they slept, found a drift as high as the farm-house already heaped between them and its walls, a distance of only fourteen yards.  He floundered through, Hogg soon following, and, finding all the family up, they agreed that they must reach the sheep as soon as possible, especially eight hundred ewes that were in one lot together, at the farthest end of the farm.  So, after family-prayers and breakfast, four of them stuffed their pockets with bread and cheese, sewed their plaids about them, tied down their hats, and, taking each his staff, set out on their tremendous undertaking, two hours before day.

Day dawned before they got three hundred yards from the house.  They could not see each other, and kept together with the greatest difficulty.  They had to make paths with their staves, rolled themselves over drifts otherwise impassable, and every three or four minutes had to hold their heads down between their knees to recover breath.  They went in single file, taking the lead by turns.  The master soon gave out and was speechless and semi-conscious for more than an hour, though he afterwards recovered and held out with the rest.  Two of them lost their head-gear, and Hogg himself fell over a high precipice, but they reached the flock at half-past ten.  They found the ewes huddled together in a dense body, under ten feet of snow,—­packed so closely, that, to the amazement of the shepherds, when they had extricated the first, the whole flock walked out one after another, in a body, through the hole.

How they got them home it is almost impossible, to tell.  It was now noon, and they sometimes could see through the storm for twenty yards, but they had only one momentary glimpse of the hills through all that terrible day.  Yet Hogg persisted in going by himself afterwards to rescue some flocks of his own, barely escaping with life from the expedition; his eyes were sealed up with the storm, and he crossed a formidable torrent, without knowing it, on a wreath of snow.  Two of the others lost themselves in a deep valley, and would have perished but for being accidentally heard by a neighboring shepherd, who guided them home, where the female portion of the family had abandoned all hope of ever seeing them again.

The next day was clear, with a cold wind, and they set forth again at daybreak to seek the remainder of the flock.  The face of the country was perfectly transformed:  not a hill was the same, not a brook or lake could be recognized.  Deep glens were filled in with snow, covering the very tops of the trees; and over a hundred acres of ground, under an average depth of six or eight feet, they were to look for four or five hundred sheep.  The attempt would have been hopeless but for a dog that accompanied them:  seeing their perplexity, he began snuffing