The short armistice over, the combat was resumed but presently Charlotte and I, a little weary of contests and of missiles that ran shudderingly down inside one's clothes, forsook the trampled battle-field of the lawn and went exploring the blank virgin spaces of the white world that lay beyond. When dinner-time came we had to be dragged in by the scruff of our necks.
Then, when the truth at last fully dawned on us and we knew that snow-balling was no longer a wistful dream, but a solid certainty waiting for us outside, it was a mere brute fight for the necessary clothes, and the lacing of boots seemed a clumsy invention, and the buttoning of coats an unduly tedious form of fastening, with all that snow going to waste at our very door. We had awakened early that winter morning, puzzled at first by the added light that filled the room. Excitement and mystery, curiosity and suspense-these were the only sentiments that tracks, whether in sand or in snow, were able to arouse in us. Footprints in the sand, now, were quite another matter, and we grasped Crusoe's attitude of mind much more easily than Wordsworth's. In a poetry-book presented to one of us by an aunt, there was a poem by one Wordsworth, in which they stood out strongly-with a picture all to themselves, too-but we didn't think very highly either of the poem or the sentiment. FOOTPRINTS in the snow have been unfailing provokers of sentiment ever since snow was first a white wonder in this drab-coloured world of ours.
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