Miss Smiley slid this moment into the conversation with a hearty “Ha! ha!” She said, “This last winter has been the happiest of my life.  I never hear the winds gallop but I want to join them.  The snow is only the winter in blossom.  Instead of here and there on the pond, the whole country is covered with white lilies.  I have seen gracefulness enough in the curve of a snowdrift to keep me in admiration for a week.  Do you remember that morning after the storm of sleet, when every tree stood in mail of ice, with drawn sword of icicle?  Besides, I think the winter drives us in, and drives us together.  We have never had such a time at our house with checker-boards and dominoes, and blind-man’s-buff, and the piano, as this winter.  Father and mother said it seemed to them like getting married over again.  Besides that, on nights when the storm was so great that the door-bell went to bed and slept soundly, Charles Dickens stepped in from Gad’s Hill; and Henry W. Longfellow, without knocking, entered the sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on the table—­Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall floor, and hung his ‘sporting jacket’ on the hat-rack, and shook the carpet brown with Highland heather.  As Walter Scott came in his dog scampered in after him, and put both paws up on the marble-top table; and Minnie asked the old man why he did not part his hair better, instead of letting it hang all over his forehead, and he apologized for it by the fact that he had been on a long tramp from Melrose Abbey to Kenilworth Castle.  But I think as thrilling an evening as we had this winter was with a man who walked in with a prison-jacket, his shoes mouldy, and his cheek pallid for the want of the sunlight.  He was so tired that he went immediately to sleep.  He would not take the sofa, saying he was not used to that, but he stretched himself on the floor and put his head on an ottoman.  At first he snored dreadfully, and it was evident he had a horrid dream; but after a while he got easier, and a smile came over his face, and he woke himself singing and shouting.  I said, ’What is the matter with you, and what were you dreaming about?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ’the bad dream I had was about the City of Destruction, and the happy dream was about the Celestial City;’ and we all knew him right away, and shouted, ’Glorious old John Bunyan!  How is Christiana?’ So, you see,” said Miss Smiley, “on stormy nights we really have a pleasanter time than when the moon and stars are reigning.”