and that the daylight, which you thought would last for hours yet, seems to be fading, and that night appears to be setting in earlier than usual.  It is!  For there are two miles of snow between you and the sun.  But in a swiftly moving maze of snow, partly spit out of the lowering clouds, and partly torn and swept up from the gray and cloud-like earth, in a roar of rising wind, and oppressed by growing anxiety, you stubbornly press on.

Night shuts down darker.  You can not tell, when you try to look about you, what is sky and what is earth; for all is storm.  You feel more and more tired.  All at once, you find that the wind which was at your side a while ago, as you kept beating into it on your course toward help and shelter, is now at your back.  Has the wind changed?  No; it will blow for hours from the same quarter—­perhaps for days!  No; you have changed your course, and are beating off with the storm!  This will never do:  you rally, and again turn your cheek to the cutting blast:  but you know that you are off your path; yet you wonder if you may not be going right—­if the wind has changed; or if you have not turned to the left when you should have gone to the right.

Loneliness, anxiety, weariness, uncertainty.  An awful sense of helplessness takes possession of you.  If it were daylight, you could pass around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks the same as the prairie grass swept bare.  You plunge headlong into it, flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, and struggle on.

You know that the snow, finer than flour, is beating through your clothing.  You are chilled, and shiver.  Sometimes-you stop for a while and with your hands over your eyes stand stooped with your back to the wind.  You try to stamp your feet to warm them, but the snow, soft and yielding, forbids this.  You are so tired that you stop to rest in the midst of a great drift—­you turn your face from the driving storm and wait.  It seems so much easier than stumbling wearily on.  Then comes the in-rushing consciousness that to rest thus is to die.  You rush on in a frenzy.  You have long since ceased to think of what is your proper course,—­you only know that you must struggle on.  You attempt a shout;—­ah, it seems so faint and distant even to yourself!  No one else could hear it a rod in this raging, howling, shrieking storm, in which awful sounds come out of the air itself, and not alone from the things against which it beats.  And there is no one else to hear.

You gaze about with snow-smitten eyeballs for some possible light from a friendly window.  Why, the sun itself could not pierce this moving earth-cloud of snow!  Your feet are not so cold as they were.  You can not feel them as you walk.  You come to a hollow filled with soft snow.  Perhaps there is the bed of a stream deep down below.  You plunge into this hollow, and as you fall, turn your face