stamped and snorted under the lee of the tors and thrust their smoking muzzles into sheltered clefts and crannies for the withered green stuff that kept life in them.  Snow presently softened the outlines of the hills, set silver caps on the granite, and brought the distant horizon nearer to the eye under crystal-clear atmosphere.  Many a wanderer, thus deceived, plodded hopefully forward at sight of smoke above a roof-tree, only to find his bourne, that seemed so near, still weary miles away.  The high Moors were a throne for death.  Cold below freezing-point endured throughout the hours of light and grew into a giant when the sun and his winter glory had huddled below the hills.

Newtake squatted like a toad upon this weary waste.  Its crofts were bare and frozen two feet deep; its sycamores were naked save for snow in the larger forks, and one shivering concourse of dead leaves, where a bough had been broken untimely, and thus held the foliage.  Suffering almost animate peered from its leaded windows; the building scowled; cattle lowed through the hours of day, and a steam arose from their red hides as they crowded together for warmth.  Often it gleamed mistily in the light of Will’s lantern when at the dead icy hour before dawn he went out to his beasts.  Then he would rub their noses, and speak to them cheerfully, and note their congealed vapours where these had ascended and frozen in shining spidery hands of ice upon the walls and rafters of the byre.  Fowls, silver-spangled and black, scratched at the earth from habit, fought for the daily grain with a ferocity the summer never saw, stalked spiritless in puffed plumage about the farmyard and collected with subdued clucking upon their roosts in a barn above the farmyard carts as soon as the sun had dipped behind the hills.  Ducks complained vocally, and as they slipped on the glassy pond they quacked out a mournful protest against the times.

The snow which fell did not melt, but shone under the red sunshine, powdered into dust beneath hoof and heel; every cart-rut was full of thin white ice, like ground window-glass, that cracked drily and split and tinkled to hobnails or iron-shod wheel.  The snow from the house-top, thawed by the warmth within, ran dribbling from the eaves and froze into icicles as thick as a man’s arm.  These glittered almost to the ground and refracted the sunshine in their prisms.

Warm-blooded life suffered for the most part silently, but the inanimate fabric of the farm complained with many a creak and crack and groan in the night watches, while Time’s servant the frost gnawed busily at old timbers and thrust steel fingers into brick and mortar.  Only the hut-circles, grey glimmering through the snow on Metherill, laughed at those cruel nights, as the Neolithic men who built them may have laughed at the desperate weather of their day; and the cross beside Blanchard’s gate, though an infant in age beside them, being fashioned of like material, similarly endured.  Of more lasting substance was this stone than an iron tongue stuck into it to latch the gate, for the metal fretted fast and shed rust in an orange streak upon the granite.