The wind gently murmured,puffed and sometimes sighed like a summer breeze lifting the leaves along the livelong night.The cat was curling up quiet in her bed.The mouse was sleeping carefree in his gallery.The dog was lying swwet on the sofa.Even the earth itself was sleeping in tranquility,exept that some house door faintly creaked upon its hinge,telling us a remote inward warmth.Nature was at her midnight work with feathery flakes whirling down in the wind,as if she was showering her silvery seeds over the fields.

Finally I woke up.The floor creaked under my feet as I moved towards the window.The snow as warm as cotton was lying calmly upon the window sill and the stillness of the morning was extremely impressive.

The roofs were standing under their snow caps,while the eaves were wearing their glittering ornaments.The trees raised white arms to the sky on every side,and where there was a wall,there were some fantastic forms of snow stretching exhilarated in the dim landscape,as if Nature had carved her fresh desighs by night as models for man's art.

Silently,I opened the door and stepped outside to face the cutting air.The moon had already lost some of its glow and the land was bathed in a dull mist.A lurid light in the east proclaimed the approach of day while the weatern landscape was bleak with some spooky stillness like a wizard kingdom.What you could only hear was the creepy sounds,seemingly out of the hell----the barking of dogs,the hammering of blacksmith,the lowing of cows and the crying of pigs under the butcher's knife.

Gradually,the lurid light darkened and spread across the west.Every flower,every tree and

every weed were bathed in the sunshine.Suddenly,it turned out that all the sounds were not for any melancholy they suggested,but for their twilight bustle which was too solemn and mysterious for me.

I moved om,treading briskly along the road,the dry and crisped snow crunching under my feet.