Having cleared the ravine, he reached the high lands swept by the winds, where the snow lay thin.  Then he found the surface a sheet of ice.  The little girl’s lukewarm breath, playing on his face, warmed it for a moment, then lingered, and froze in his hair, stiffening it into icicles.

He felt the approach of another danger.  He could not afford to fall.  He knew that if he did so he should never rise again.  He was overcome by fatigue, and the weight of the darkness would, as with the dead woman, have held him to the ground, and the ice glued him alive to the earth.

He had tripped upon the slopes of precipices, and had recovered himself; he had stumbled into holes, and had got out again.  Thenceforward the slightest fall would be death; a false step opened for him a tomb.  He must not slip.  He had not strength to rise even to his knees.  Now everything was slippery; everywhere there was rime and frozen snow.  The little creature whom he carried made his progress fearfully difficult.  She was not only a burden, which his weariness and exhaustion made excessive, but was also an embarrassment.  She occupied both his arms, and to him who walks over ice both arms are a natural and necessary balancing power.

He was obliged to do without this balance.

He did without it and advanced, bending under his burden, not knowing what would become of him.

This little infant was the drop causing the cup of distress to overflow.

He advanced, reeling at every step, as if on a spring board, and accomplishing, without spectators, miracles of equilibrium.  Let us repeat that he was, perhaps, followed on this path of pain by eyes unsleeping in the distances of the shadows—­the eyes of the mother and the eyes of God.  He staggered, slipped, recovered himself, took care of the infant, and, gathering the jacket about her, he covered up her head; staggered again, advanced, slipped, then drew himself up.  The cowardly wind drove against him.  Apparently, he made much more way than was necessary.  He was, to all appearance, on the plains where Bincleaves Farm was afterwards established, between what are now called Spring Gardens and the Parsonage House.  Homesteads and cottages occupy the place of waste lands.  Sometimes less than a century separates a steppe from a city.

Suddenly, a lull having occurred in the icy blast which was blinding him, he perceived, at a short distance in front of him, a cluster of gables and of chimneys shown in relief by the snow.  The reverse of a silhouette—­a city painted in white on a black horizon, something like what we call nowadays a negative proof.  Roofs—­dwellings—­shelter!  He had arrived somewhere at last.  He felt the ineffable encouragement of hope.  The watch of a ship which has wandered from her course feels some such emotion when he cries, “Land ho!”

He hurried his steps.

At length, then, he was near mankind.  He would soon be amidst living creatures.  There was no longer anything to fear.  There glowed within him that sudden warmth—­security; that out of which he was emerging was over; thenceforward there would no longer be night, nor winter, nor tempest.  It seemed to him that he had left all evil chances behind him.  The infant was no longer a burden.  He almost ran.