CHAPTER XXIV.
HOME A tearing, howling wind from the north--from the boundless snow-clad plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow.
The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty degrees below freezing-point.

A drift--constant, restless, never altering--sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before a steady wind.

This white scud--a flying scud of frozen water--was singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a cyclone in the China Seas.

Any object that broke the wind--a stunted pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post--had at its leeward side a high, narrow snow-drift tailing off to the dead level of the plain.

Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once.