When the Snow Melts

OPHEAVY banks of congealed snow make a funnel of the dripping path between my highland school-house and the high road. Taking to-day a telescopic view down its dreary length, I saw it close in for the first time this week on a speck of black. It proved to be no lost crow, but a human being. Like a blind man restored to sight, I watched this growing blotch of colour in a white world, wading kneedeep through the yielding slush. As he jumped and wriggled his way to the school-house, through the slough of sloppy snow, that met with a drowning gluck as he drew his feet out of it, like a disappointed crocodile snapping at a swimmer, I recognized the clerk of the board. He had taken advantage of the thaw to wade his way to me with the news that the inspector had fixed the examination for the beginning of the month. That was stealing a valuable fortnight from me; but measles had broken out at Tirl, where he would otherwise have been, and the inspector had to take it out of some one. My face blanked, I daresay, as the clerk showed me the intimation in its official envelope, and I already saw my outspoken Fellow of Oxford invading the glen in his overpowering carriage and pair.

The clerk would have been pounds lighter could he have shaken his feet out of the shapeless lumps of muddy snow that hugged his boots. As it was, some of the crust fell off to his vigorous stamping, and the rest he dragged after him into the school-house. I had four pupils: my own boy, Waster Lunny's little girl, and two more toddlers from another farm. The clerk surveyed them quizzically, lost behind their squeaking slates among clammy desks that had forgotten the prick of boys' gully knives, and shook his head. He tried to speak, bat the echo from the empty room startled him into silence, and we went to the kitchen. The loss of the Government grant stared me in the face. To hold my hands over the fire was to see it vanishing up the chimney in smoke. I laced my boots with a heavy heart, determined to take the advice of the board, as conveyed by the clerk, and canvass the farms in person. The farmers might be again persuaded to yoke their idle horses and bring the children through the slush in carts. This mode of conveyance had been abandoned two winter's before, after Tullin's stallion and cart got stuck in a howe of snow, from which the children were rescued one by one by Waster Lunny's on horseback.

The crusted snow in the fields sinks sulkily under our feet (for all the crispness has been taken from it by the thaw), leaving room for a dark film of water, as we work our way down to the ford. One of Waster Lunny's hens, that had distinguished itself earlier in the year by throttling a hungry rat in the henhouse, accompanies us to the limits of the farmer's domain, but cannot be induced to trespass, and our weariest work begins when we reach the river. Winter drowns the stepping-stones by which the swivelling stream is easily crossed in the parched months, and except when there are horse and cart to rumble recklessly over the slipping sand and gravel, there is nothing for it but to wade. The farmers of the district have provided a pair of stilts on which acrobats can ford the rush of water with dry shoes, but our diligent search for them is unsuccessful, and my experience tells me why. They are doubtless hid away among the whins on the other side by some selfish ploughman, in anticipation of his return journey. The clerk plunges boldly into the water, glad to have the slush washed from his cheeping boots at whatever cost, and I follow, with mine dangling round my neck. The white bank is dotted with grey holes, showing where human feet have broken its surface without reaching earth. Evidently mankind is beginning to move about again.

In dark places the trees have melted the snow as it touched them. Their trunks show damp and sodden, the ruts overcharged with a wet green dust, but the palings they insufficiently protect have soft white tops, and it is by them we drag ourselves from farm to farm. At each a cheery welcome. To wile away an hour from the listless farmer is to offer a big bribe for his children. All agree that an effort must be made to have the bairns at the school-house on the examination day, but they shake their heads at the sky when I insist that without regular attendance we are lost. The parents could talk by the hour of the intellectual powers of their boys and girls, but will not risk their lives to save my specific subjects. A promise is at last drawn from some of them to send a cartload of children down to the ford on the morrow, if there be no further fall of snow. The understanding is that Waster Lunny's cart meets them there and carries them to the school-house.

The farms are scattered over the hillsides, squat and silent in the general whiteness. It is afternoon by the time we leave Whinstanes and cut the elbow of the glen where it turns sharply to the right and runs its head into a gully. To us who have fished the river until you lose it in a wilderness of morass, the road presents no special danger, though it is felt rather than seen. Water trickles down the rocks of sandstone, perforating the snowy sheet at their base, and the stream, running deep, squeezes its way between narrow scars. The general effect, even on a sunny days, is depressing and damp. To-day the threatening cliffs scowl across the water into each other's face, suggesting the explosion that must follow if the jammed water were to freeze; and we remember the legend of the girl who fell over the rocks to her death, on her way to market, without any of the eggs being broken in the descent. There is a swirl of water higher up the glen that fascinated the earl's mother-in-law into taking a shower-bath in its reeking foam. At the farm of Brunt Braes, for which the clerk and I were bent, they show the ropes by which she was dangled in mid air across the linn.

Brunt Braes is standing helplessly near his door as we cross the steading dyke, his long face showing red against his good wife's "washing," that hangs hard and brittle from the ropes. The thaw has not been sufficiently keen to soften the linen stiffened by nature's starch. The farmer is a decent man, cursed with a scientific leaning that had brought water-pipes into the house, to burst with the approach of a thaw and flood his house. A monster hole in the swaying ceiling, down which a continuous rush of water, carrying woodwork and plaster in its headlong course, splashes to the parlour floor, gapes over swimming chairs and tables; and all Brunt Braes can do is to wring his hands and tell bis frantic womenkind to "sweep it up." His exasperated wife, too excited to stay with us in the kitchen, finally pushes him out of doors, and we strike down the brae to the manse without further parley. In the circumstances it would be mockery to mention the examination, and we are footsore and weary. A lighted candle stuck by some mischievous boy in the window of a gaunt tower that stands shelterless in a field, though itself a shelter to shivering cattle, winks in the darkness to the wind; the sun has long since sunk behind the hills, and the manse in its ring of cottages stands out invitingly in the night. The snow fast loses its colour.

The minister's story of life at the top of the glen bodes ill for my school attendance. In two Sabbaths the kirk door-key did not leave its rusty nail in the manse library and an attempt at service on the third nearly ended tragically. As the handful of worshippers and their dogs, not one for every dozen pews, were on the point of filing out, a mountain of snow clattered down the roof and fell with a thud on the doorstep. A moment later, and men and women would have been buried. The parishioners stood with their hearts in their mouths, and then, to the whining of their dogs, followed the minister out by the vestry. Later in the evening I cross the road for the key, thought to have been left in the kirk door, and in groping for it my hand strikes a hanging rope. In the still night the bell clangs shrilly, and the ghostly hills murmur in their sleep. The uncanny cry goes from ben to ben round the dreaming glen. I stand as if turned to stone. In the crumbling keep the light blinks itself to death. I sleep at the manse.