Excerpt: Night's sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious "Spon-n-n-n-g!' of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.