IT

BESIEGED IN THE SNOW.

[THOMAS DE QUINCEY.]

T was to a sale of domestic furniture, at the house of some proprietor in Langdale, that George and Sarah Green set forward in the forenoon of a day fated to be their last on earth. The sale was to take place in Langdalehead; to which, from their own cottage in Easdale, it was possible in daylight, and supposing no mist on the hills, to find out a short cut of not more than five or six miles. By this route they went; and, notwithstanding the snow lay on the ground, they reached their destination in safety. The attendance at the sale must have been diminished by the rigorous state of the weather; but still the scene was a gay one, as usual. The time for general separation was considerably after sunset; and the final recollections of the crowd with respect to George and Sarah Green were, that upon their intention being understood to retrace their morning path, and to attempt the perilous task of dropping down into Easdale from the mountains above Langdalehead, a sound of remonstrance arose from many quarters. However, at such a moment, when everybody was in the hurry of departure, the opposition could not be very obstinate. Party after party rode off; the meeting melted away, or, as the northern phrase is, scaled; and the Greens quitted the scene, professing to obey some advice or other upon the choice of roads, but, at as early a point as they could do so unobserved, began to ascend the hills. After this they were seen no more. They had disappeared into the cloud of death. Voices were heard, some hours afterwards, from the mountains— voices, as some thought, of alarm; others said, No, that it was only the voices of jovial people, carried by the wind into uncertain regions. The result was, that no attention was paid to the sounds.

That night, in little peaceful Easdale, six children sat by a peat fire, expecting the return of their parents, upon whom they depended for their daily bread. Let a day pass, and they were starving. Every sound, every echo among the hills, was listened to for five hours, from seven to twelve. At length the eldest girl of the family--about nine years old-told her little brothers and sisters to go to bed. They had been trained to obedience; and all of them, at the voice of their eldest sister, went off fearfully to their beds. Some time in the course of the evening-but it was late, and after midnight-the moon arose, and shed a torrent of light upon the Langdale fells, which had already, long hours before, witnessed in darkness the death of their parents.

That night, and the following morning, came a further and a heavier fall of snow; in consequence of which the poor children were completely imprisoned, and cut off from all possibility of communicating with their next neighbours. The brook was too much for them to leap; and the little crazy wooden bridge could not be crossed, or even approached, with safety, from the drifting of the snow having made it impossible to ascertain the exact situation of some treacherous hole in its timbers, which, if trod upon, would have let a small child drop through into the rapid waters. Their parents did not return. For some hours of the morning the children clung to the hope that the extreme severity of the night had tempted them to sleep in Langdale; but this hope forsook them as the day wore away. The poor desolate children, hourly becoming more convinced that they were orphans, huddled together in the evening round their hearth-fire of peats, and held their little family councils upon what was to be done towards any chance-if chance remainedof yet giving aid to their parents; for a slender hope had sprung up that some hovel or sheep-fold might have furnished them a screen against the weather quarter of the storm, in which hovel they might even now be lying snowed up; and secondly, as regarded themselves, in what way they were to make known their situation, in case the snow should continue or should increase: for starvation stared them in the face, if they should be confined for many days to their house.

Meantime the eldest sister, little Agnes, though sadly alarmed, and feeling the sensation of eeriness as twilight came on, and she looked out from the cottage door to the dreadful fells on which, too probably, her parents were lying corpses (and possibly not many hundred yards from their own threshold), yet exerted herself to take all the measures which their own prospects made prudent. Having caused all her brothers and sisters-except the two little things,

not yet of a fit age-to kneel down and say the prayers which they had been taught, this admirable little maiden turned herself to every household task that could have proved useful to them in a long captivity. First of all, upon some recollection that the clock was nearly going down, she wound it up. Next, she took all the milk which remained from what her mother had provided for the children's consumption during her absence, and for the breakfast of the following morning-this luckily was still in sufficient plenty for two days' consumption-and scalded it, so as to save it from turning sour. That done, she next examined the meal chest; made the common oatmeal porridge of the country; but put all of the children, except the two youngest, on short allowance; and, by way of reconciling them in some measure to this stinted meal, she found out a little hoard of flour, part of which she baked for them upon the hearth into little cakes: and this unusual delicacy persuaded them to think that they had been celebrating a feast. Next, before night coming on should make it too trying to her own feelings, or before fresh snow coming on might make it impossible, she issued out of doors. There her first task was, with the assistance of two younger brothers, to carry in from the peat-stack as many peats as might serve them for a week's consumption. That done, in the second place she examined the potatoes, buried in 'brackens' (that is, withered fern): these were not many, and she thought it better to leave them where they were, excepting as many as would make a single meal, under a fear that the heat of their cottage would spoil them if removed.

Having thus made all the provision in her power for supporting their own lives, she turned her attention to the cow. Her she milked; but unfortunately the milk she gave, either from being badly fed or from some other cause, was too trifling to be of much consideration towards the wants of a large family. Here, however, her chief