There was no pathway cut to David’s cottage; and no track trodden, except what David, coming to the house sometimes, and Hugh going every afternoon to the cottage, made between them.  Hugh often went to the knees in snow, but was well dried and warmed by Janet’s care when he arrived.  She had always a pair of stockings and slippers ready for him at the fire, to be put on the moment of his arrival; and exchanged again for his own, dry and warm, before he footed once more the ghostly waste.  When neither moon was up nor stars were out, there was a strange eerie glimmer from the snow that lighted the way home; and he thought there must be more light from it than could be accounted for merely by the reflection of every particle of light that might fall upon it from other sources.

Margaret was not kept to the house by the snow, even when it was falling.  She went out as usual—­not of course wandering far, for walking was difficult now.  But she was in little danger of losing her way, for she knew the country as well as any one; and although its face was greatly altered by the filling up of its features, and the uniformity of the colour, yet those features were discernible to her experienced eye through the sheet that covered them.  It was only necessary to walk on the tops of dykes, and other elevated ridges, to keep clear of the deep snow.

There were many paths between the cottages and the farms in the neighbourhood, in which she could walk with comparative ease and comfort.  But she preferred wandering away through the fields and toward the hills.  Sometimes she would come home like a creature of the snow, born of it, and living in it; so covered was she from head to foot with its flakes.  David used to smile at her with peculiar complacency on such occasions.  It was evident that it pleased him she should be the playmate of Nature.  Janet was not altogether indulgent to these freaks, as she considered them, of Marget—­she had quite given up calling her Meg, “sin’ she took to the beuk so eident.”  But whatever her mother might think of it, Margaret was in this way laying up a store not only of bodily and mental health, but of resources for thought and feeling, of secret understandings and communions with Nature, and everything simple, and strong, and pure through Nature, than which she could have accumulated nothing more precious.

This kind of weather continued for some time, till the people declared they had never known a storm last so long “ohn ever devallt,” that is, without intermission.  But the frost grew harder; and then the snow, instead of falling in large adhesive flakes, fell in small dry flakes, of which the boys could make no snaw-ba’s.  All the time, however, there was no wind; and this not being a sheep country, there was little uneasiness or suffering occasioned by the severity of the weather, beyond what must befall the poorer classes in every northern country during the winter.