thicker, with a darkness that might be felt.  The boggy soil on which I stood quaked under me if I remained long in one place, and yet I dared not move far.  All my youthful hardiness seemed to leave me at once.  I was on the point of crying, and only very shame seemed to keep it down.  To save myself from shedding tears, I shouted—­terrible, wild shouts for bare life they were.  I turned sick as I paused to listen; no answering sound came but the unfeeling echoes.  Only the noiseless, pitiless snow kept falling thicker, thicker—­faster, faster!  I was growing numb and sleepy.  I tried to move about, but I dared not go far, for fear of the precipices which, I knew, abounded in certain places on the Fells.  Now and then, I stood still and shouted again; but my voice was getting choked with tears, as I thought of the desolate helpless death I was to die, and how little they at home, sitting round the warm, red, bright fire, wotted what was become of me,—­and how my poor father would grieve for me—­it would surely kill him—­it would break his heart, poor old man!  Aunt Fanny too—­was this to be the end of all her cares for me?  I began to review my life in a strange kind of vivid dream, in which the various scenes of my few boyish years passed before me like visions.  In a pang of agony, caused by such remembrance of my short life, I gathered up my strength and called out once more, a long, despairing, wailing cry, to which I had no hope of obtaining any answer, save from the echoes around, dulled as the sound might be by the thickened air.  To my surprise I heard a cry—­almost as long, as wild as mine—­so wild that it seemed unearthly, and I almost thought it must be the voice of some of the mocking spirits of the Fells, about whom I had heard so many tales.  My heart suddenly began to beat fast and loud.  I could not reply for a minute or two.  I nearly fancied I had lost the power of utterance.  Just at this moment a dog barked.  Was it Lassie’s bark—­my brother’s collie?—­an ugly enough brute, with a white, ill-looking face, that my father always kicked whenever he saw it, partly for its own demerits, partly because it belonged to my brother.  On such occasions, Gregory would whistle Lassie away, and go off and sit with her in some outhouse.  My father had once or twice been ashamed of himself, when the poor collie had yowled out with the suddenness of the pain, and had relieved himself of his self-reproach by blaming my brother, who, he said, had no notion of training a dog, and was enough to ruin any collie in Christendom with his stupid way of allowing them to lie by the kitchen fire.  To all which Gregory would answer nothing, nor even seem to hear, but go on looking absent and moody.