Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/90

. 12, 1861.] themselves in such seasons when their various kinds of prey are in hiding. The pullets have begun to lay; and their eggs are very tempting to their enemies.

The turn of the thieves comes when the snow has fallen. Every track and tread is known; and no creature in hiding, if not winged, can escape, after going abroad over new-fallen snow. Every hollow in a tree or a hedge, every refuge in a stack, or a drain, or a cluster of rocks, is discovered and routed out. The rat-catcher is summoned with his dogs and other apparatus: and a farmer should be a good-humoured man, to look on while the vermin is driven out of his stacks and barns. It is enough to make a man cross to see how much of his hard-won produce has gone to feed and fatten a barrow-load of foul thieves like these. He makes a great clearance of them now that the chief part of the mischief is done.

He cannot find in his heart to stop the compensating process—that of obtaining game by tracking in the snow—though the law forbids the practice, in fear of the extirpation of the races. Hares and rabbits are seen on more tables than at any other time of year. The deer are kept within hail by making them comfortable within certain limits. There is food strewn for them in the most sheltered wood-paths: and the keepers pass from stack to stack of the fodder laid up at regular stations, forking out the food, and seeing that the cisterns are neither empty nor frozen.

We have seldom to wait long for the snow when the weather is so cold as I have said. As we descend from the moor, we see the sky becoming dark and heavy to windward,—the air seeming to thicken there from minute to minute. Nobody is very sorry that snow is coming, though some would perhaps put it off for just a very few days, for the better prosecution of skating. Not a few wish the snow had come before the hard frost. Here it is, however, sure to do much good.

Yet, it appears to me, there is some admixture of undefined dread in many minds with the welcome given to a genuine snowfall. The question is, when will it stop? This is the question, spoken or suppressed, uppermost in the minds of dwellers among hills, or in the north country.

This is the occasion on which we have to learn to go without news, to wait for our letters, to undergo the inconveniences of non-intercourse beyond our own parish. On looking out in the morning, we find as much snow piled up as window-sill and ledges will support; and the sashes must be opened at top. Man and boy are everywhere sweeping tracks to coal-sheds, dairies, and entrance gates. There is no post at breakfast. After breakfast every householder goes out upon his roof, with assistants, and clears the gutters, and throws over all the snow he can reach into the middle of the road or street, before the traffic of the day begins.