deposit him where he would never come out alive.  To a man alone on the hill in such weather, the task was arduous, the danger great; moreover, in the last thirty-six hours he had walked far, had undergone great toil, and he had been without sleep all night.  The prospect was no pleasing one.  But he struggled on through the blinding, wind-driven snow, heading, as he confidently believed, straight for home.  Yet doubt presently began to fill his mind.  He should long ago have reached the Douglas Burn, but not a sign even suggestive of such a thing as a watercourse had he yet seen.  Presently he roused with a start, for now he stood amongst trees, stretching apparently in endless succession to an infinite distance.  After all, it seemed that he had missed his way.  Where he was he could not tell; and it needed some minutes of anxious groping ere he could clear his mind and make certain of his position.  He stood not much more than fifty yards from the farm-house door, by the side of a little clump of trees, which in that blurred light and in the confusion of the drifting snow took on the semblance of some vast forest.  Without being aware of it, Hogg had crossed the gully of the Douglas Burn on a bridge formed by the deep snow, and crossed over the park wall in similar fashion.

Many have been the terrible winters since those of which Hogg wrote, many the lives lost, and more, perhaps, the narrow escapes from what seemed certain death.  In 1803 the frozen, deep-buried body of a man was found near Ashestiel, within what—­but for the raging storm the previous night—­must have been easy hail of his own cottage, where, sick with anxiety, his wife and little ones sat waiting his return from the hill.  In that same storm a young shepherd, within sight of his own father, fell over a precipice near Birkhill, and, with spine hopelessly injured, lay helpless amongst the snow-covered boulders in a place inaccessible to the distracted father.  A party succeeded in rescuing him, but rescue availed him little; he lay afterwards at home for several weeks unable to stir hand or foot, and in great pain, till death mercifully released him.

In 1825 came an on-fall so sudden and violent that scores of people who happened to be on journeys were compelled to remain for weeks wherever they had chanced to be when the storm broke.  There was no possibility of getting away; except those in the immediate vicinity of large towns, all roads were completely blocked, and communication was absolutely cut off.  The mails had ceased to run, and of course in those days the electric telegraph was unknown.  Thus, many a man, the father of a family, was parted indefinitely from wife and children without possibility of allaying their anxiety for his welfare; many a commercial traveller passed week after week in some roadside inn, waiting vainly for the long-delayed thaw to enable him to communicate with his employer.  And had country people in those days depended for their supplies on tradesmen’s carts, as is the custom now, many a family must have found itself in the direst straits ere the storm was half over.