Just then Mrs. Rexford came upstairs to consult her about something.  She joined in the outlook for a few moments, and the sunset made her reflective.

“Well, my love,” said she, “last year at this time we did not know we should be here to-day!  Ah, Sophia, it is always a little doleful to see the Old Year go out; but here, where there are no bells in the churches, it will seem less solemn.”

END OF BOOK I.

BOOK II.

   “Necessity, like light’s electric force,
   Is in ourselves and all things, and no more
   Without us than within us—.”

CHAPTER I.

The bells have solemn sound that from old belfries ring the passing of the year in the hearing of thousands; but perhaps it is a more solemn thing to watch and tell the birth of a new year by the march of stars that look down out of their purple void upon a land of trackless snow.  If ceremony and the united sentiment of many hearts have impressive effect, they yet tend to lighten the burden of individual responsibility, which presses with weight, like the weight of the atmosphere upon a vacuum, when a man tries to grapple with his own soul in solitude.

Alec Trenholme was spending another wakeful night in the living-room of his small railway station.  Winter lay around him.  For a month the blueberry flats and bramble thickets had been wholly lost under the snow, which stretched far whiter than the pure white of the birch trees in the nearest groves.  Now the last night but one of the old year had brought a fresh downfall, unusually heavy; the long, straight railway track, and the sleigh-road which was kept open between the station and Turrifs Settlement, had been obliterated by it.  Alec Trenholme had awoke that morning to observe that his little station of new wood, and the endless line of rough telegraph poles, were the only remaining signs of man’s lordship of earth, as far as his eyes could see.  It was upon this sight, when the snow clouds had fled, that he had seen a scarlet sun come up; over the same scene he had watched it roll its golden chariot all day, and, tinging the same unbroken drifts, it had sunk scarlet again in the far southwest.  He had not been far from his house, and no one, in train, or sleigh, or on snow-shoes, had happened to come near it.

He would have gone himself to Turrifs for milk, for the pleasure of exchanging a word with his fellow-men, and for air and exercise, had it not been that he had hourly expected to see an engine, with its snow-plough, approaching on the rails.  Conversation by telegraph would have been a relief to him, but the wires seemed to have succumbed in more than one place to their weight of snow, and there was nothing for this young station-master to do but wait, and believe that communication would be re-established over the road and the wires sooner or later.  In the meantime he suffered no personal inconvenience, unless loneliness can be thus named, for he had abundance of food and fuel.  He watched the bright day wane and the sun of the old year set, and filled his stove with wood, and ate his supper, and told himself that he was a very fortunate fellow and much better off than a large proportion of men.