the writer cannot deny that he is glad to have escaped from its severities, yet he is satisfied that in the main its effect was excellent. For one thing, it taught the habit of obedience and of reverence; for another, that of self-denial. No one can deny himself in obedience to a sense of duty without being a gainer thereby.

Men from time to time tax the hardness of their early training with their aversion to attending church. But I rarely hear them credit their virtues to their training. The writer's observation is that those who have been trained to go to church, in the main continue to do so in after-life. If there are any who were not brought up to attend church, they did not come from Hanover. The old Virginian in "The Barton Experiment," however low he sank during the week, always "shaped up," put on a clean shirt, and attended church on Sunday, because his mother had brought him up to do it.

Moreover, there was something that came from that direct recognition of God, and that sturdy determination to do one's

duty as it was understood, that gave a "body to the character not so commonly found nowadays.

But however rigorous was the life, we who underwent it look back to it now with only affection. It was clean and pure and stimulating. In a measure it still exists, though tempered by the softening influence of freer thought, the currents of which have reached even that retired haven.

Most of the old homes that once bordered the Fork Church road have passed away; but happily a few of them still remain. The old Fork Church, with its generations of worshippers sleeping in the shade of its oaks and cedars, still stands as a sanctuary for those who were reared in its teachings.

One cannot leave the dust and turmoil of the city and spend a Sunday there without feeling that he has climbed to a higher level and breathed a rarer air. It is as if he has taken a plunge into a cool and limpid spring. He comes away refreshed and stimulated.

W

HILE the moist lands of the fields and the edges of the creeks were ablaze with the balm and the cardinal flowers, and the most striking displays of golden-rod, purple asters, and black-eyed Susans were yet to come, a signal announcing the approach of winter was seen in the air around the borders of the Adirondack wilderness.

For months the swallows had been rearing their families in tiny mud houses, hung under the eaves of the old barns, and in sod-roofed dugouts in the slip-banks. The young had been fed and trained until the youngest fledglings were a-wing, and the whole feathered community was able to go swooping at will, hither and yon, over fields and wood-lots wholly care free. In

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And there

rose to the lowering clouds. they remained, flying swiftly to and fro on the breath of the gale, until lost to view in the gloom and murk of night.

For sixty hours the storm raged with fury, and then it fled away, leaving the air as buoyant as in June. But the swallows did not come back to their homes. They had migrated to escape the rigors of winter !

A month later the woodchucks, that had been scampering about the meadows with dragging bellies, or sitting up on their haunches to look for relentless boys and dogs, suddenly disappeared altogether, though the aftermath was as sweet and nourishing as the grass of June. They, too, had foreseen the winter and had curled up in their tiny caves below the frost-line. A month later still came a winter signal, that even man could read. On October 16th the rain fell in varying but unceasing torrents all day long. It was a rain that invited the hardy lover of nature to walk across the fields, if only to see the mosses and red-combed lichens swell and brighten under the influence of their abundant drink. But at five o'clock in the afternoon the wind whipped around to the northwest, and a moment later the rain gust grew white with driven snow.

This snow fell for only half an hour, and when it was done no trace of it could be found, save for a trifle of melting mush in the lee of logs and stumps, but it was the first blast of the Adirondack winter, and it was a foretaste of the storms that began on November 9th, and came thereafter, at decreasing intervals, until the days were upon us wherein snow might fall with scarcely an hour's interval for a week at a stretch. And it is when the snow-storms seem never-ending that one who is prepared to face them finds the days too short; when one feels a hearty pity for city friends cooped up in overheated offices or hanging to the straps in the sloppy, nauseating trolley-cars.

At a casual glance-to the tenderfoot -the Adirondack snow-storms are all alike. Each is a disintegrating, shivering shroud over a lifeless landscape. But as one learns to see the variations in, and the beauties of, the storms, their power to fascinate grows irresistibly. The snow-storm of November 9th came with howling

blasts. The wind rose to sixty miles an hour, in some of its fiercest moments, and its varying speeds gathered the snow into vertical waves that fled away like the scud of a cyclone. And when the gusts drove through the groves that are found on the crests of hill-tops and along the overlooking borderlands of the streams, the snow boomed out in commingling clouds, like the smoke of an old-time broadside.

To one who had learned to look closer still, there was a curious scene at every fence built athwart the course of the gale; for from under every bottom rail or board the snow came spurting, instead of flowing-came in such swift pulse-beats from the heart of the storm that no one could count them. It is a sight to stir the blood of a Viking.

Then the narrow ridges that lay across the path of the gale gave another picture. Those that presented precipitous sides to the blast were especially notable to the unaccustomed spectator, for there the wind struck the slanting face, and bounding up, it hurled the snow in a frozen spray and spoondrift, far into the air. To see this picture at its best one must stand on the very edge of the ridge, and look along its length, though that is a post that will, when the scene is best worth seeing, test one's strength as well as hardihood. For the power of a winter gale on an open ridge, a thousand feet above sea-level, is something astounding to one who has never faced it.

Equally interesting, if less striking, was the snowfall beginning on the night of November 24th. The storm came from the northwest, and the air, though it moved with moderate speed, showed a weight that was due to an unusual load of moist

ure.

Indeed we looked for rain, although the ground had been covered from view with snow for more than a week; but as night came on, the flakes began to fall— large, soft flakes that filled the air like a monstrous fog, and clung fast wherever they touched.

This was a snow-storm to draw the lover of nature to the forest rather than the open ridges, but at night it presented one feature in the field that may be called startling. In crossing the meadows and pastures, toward a favorite corner of the forest, at eight o'clock at night, we observed

long, dark, and distinct shadows on the southerly side of every fence-post, stump, and tree. They were as plainly marked as the shadows cast by the moon on a clear night in its first quarter, and at sight of them we turned to the north to look for the aurora borealis, although the wet snow was steadily falling from the heavily clouded sky. But no trace of an electrical display was to be seen. Next an attempt was made to trace the shadows to the moon, even though they were on the southerly side of the fence-posts and treetrunks, but, of course, no such connection could be made. Finally we got down and felt of the snow where the shadows lay, and that solved the mystery. There was really no shadow. The wind from the north was, as said, moderate, and the snow was clinging. Wherever a flake landed it remained. The weather side of each post or tree-trunk was covered with the snow, but the opposite side was bare and black, while the old snow in the lee of each obstruction showed dark and shadow-like by contrast with the newly fallen snow beside it.

All night long this clinging snow fell in masses; and it continued to cling, though the wind rose to half a moderate gale say twenty miles an hour, at one time. Then at daylight the wind died down, the snowfall ceased, and by eight o'clock the clouds had disappeared, revealing a scene that stirred even the most ignorant and stupid laborer of the region to enthusiasm.

Every limb and twig and tiny bud was loaded with the utmost burden of snow it seemed able to carry, and the whole forest side drooped in wondrous curves.

And when the broad picture afforded by a forest-covered mountain-side was examined in detail the wonder and delight grew together. For then it was seen that every tree bore its burden with a grace that was all its own.

Most striking of all was the yellow birch. For the long, slender limbs of the last summer's growth were in every case so close together, and so well interlaced, that they caught and held the wet snow in deep, broad masses; and because these limbs were so long and slender they were in every case drooped lower and bent in rounder and more beautiful curves, than those of any other tree. The whole moun

tain-side was festooned and tasselled by the graceful birches.

And yet it is a question whether the birches were not more striking because of their profusion, rather than because the individual trees were more beautiful than the individual hemlocks. A curious feature of the broad picture was in the fact that the drooping of the leafless trees brought into view the evergreens, of which the most conspicuous, in our well-culled forests, are the hemlocks. And so, while one would gaze at the tassels and festoons formed at the mountain-side by the birches, his eyes saw also the scattered hemlocks rising between. In summer, the hemlock, with its feathery plumes waving in the sunlit breeze, is beyond doubt our most beautiful tree; and now, with every graceful length curved to the weight of snow, and its leaves showing a shade of green that was deepened by contrast with the crystalwhite burden, the picture was one to swell the heart.

And then there were the spear-headed spruces, tipped as if with white quartz; the rock maples, with their trunks as sturdy as the granite bowlders grasped between their roots; and the well-divided elms with limbs that seemed to sway in the sunlight, though no wind was blowing; and the beeches, with their salmon-colored leaves silenced, for once, by their white, wet blanket; and the white-trunked poplars, and the thick-topped thorn apples, and the red-barked cherries-each of these, after a few moments' study, could be as readily distinguished by its figure under its unusual burden, as by the texture of its bark.

Still another open feature of this wonderful snowfall must be mentioned. The ridges on the southwest corner of the wilderness (where these notes were written), trend east and west as a rule, and a mile and a half north of the home of the writer, on the west of Canada Creek, is found the dividing ridge between the waters that flow into the Hudson and those that flow into Lake Ontario. These ridges lay square across the path of the snowstorm, and the tree-covered crests interrupted the flow of the gale, especially when at its highest speed, with a result of novel beauty. For the snow-laden wind was thrown into eddies, as it passed these

crests, and so a double quantity of snow was dropped on the limbs of the trees just a-lee of the hill-top. Indeed so much snow fell there that it was piled up in huge masses on other trees as well as on the yellow birches, and so there was seen on the lee of every one of these hills a line of true aërial snow-drifts-a line of drifts that were in some cases nearly two feet deep, held high above the earth.

But that was a picture seen with more pleasure from a distance than close at hand, for the trees groaned aloud under the unwonted burden. The weight was too great to be borne in many cases; it searched out the weaker limbs and joints, and tore them away, leaving many a fair tree-top ragged and even utterly ruined.

As it happened the weather grew warm by day, after this snowfall, and then grew cold by night, for nearly a week. So the snow melted and gathered in icy balls at every twig, and about every bud. Every shrub and tree was dotted-the whole forest side was flecked over with tiny spots of white, and when looking at any copse or wood-lot the wanderer seemed to view it through an open-laced curtain of nature's weaving.

When seen from within the forest the clinging snow-storm afforded many other features of interest. We had noticed with pleasure the opening vistas in the forest, as the leaves fell, and now, with equal pleasure, we found ourselves shut in by the growing white foliage of snow. While sitting on a log during the night this snow came we could see the vistas shorten, and in the day storms we have seen a similar shortening, though not in such a swift degree. It was a singular experience to see the forest closing in around us in that fashion.

A walk through the forest while the snow is on the trees shows many a slender tree bent down to the ground. Cherries and soft maples suffer badly, but the birches more frequently than all other trees combined. A young birch is a most persistent tree. Though it be rooted in an unculled forest, it will reach up, thread-shaped, with only a tiny tuft of foliage at the top, till it secures a full share of sunlight. One thinks of sunshine, by the way, as something of a free gift, but the young trees have to work for it. So slender is the support of the

birches while they work and wait, that the clinging snows of winter gather in their bush-tops and literally weigh them to the ground, and many an aspiring birch dies in the struggle. A few straighten up; a still smaller number survive by sending up new shoots-limbs that start near the ground and become in time veritable tree-trunks. The stroller can find these hieroglyphic tales of old-time snow-storms in every square mile of the Adirondacks; and there are many other hieroglyphic stories there for him who can read them.

Fresh snow is almost always notably whiter than that which has lain even on the widest, cleanest fields for a day, but one storm of the winter was a marked departure from this general rule. It came on January 7th. On looking away toward the more distant hills, during our afternoon walk, we noticed that they seemed to be obscured by a bluish mist; or, rather, that the hills showed a blue shade through a thin intervening mist. The sky was wholly overcast with clouds that showed no peculiarity, but the color of the mist called for a closer observation, and then it was seen that tiny flakes of snow were falling at wide intervals, but steadily. The mist was a thin veiling of snow borne on a breeze that was travelling perhaps ten miles an hour.

These snow-storms, if storms they may be called, are common enough. On many days of the winter the tiny flakes fall at relatively wide intervals all day long, but it was observed that on this day the haze of the snowfall was of a more decided or darker blue than usual. For the ordinary thin snowfall throws a gray-blue haze—a haze that is a blue tint, while this was of a shade of blue. From looking at the hills we turned to look at the surface of the old snow near at hand. The view was now startling, for the fresh snow had gathered in thin drifts, wherever obstructions were found, and these drifts were so nearly black that the crust of the old snow looked crystal white by contrast!

Very quickly a handful was gathered for examination under a pocket magnifying-glass, because the amateur observer of nature is apt to see things that are not there, and must needs be cautious. But this time the eye was not deceived. A sooty, fibrous, black dust was mingled with