Valuable suggestions for magazine reading will be gained if each member of the class chooses some one magazine, agreeing to examine the numbers as they appear, and to inform the class of the most interesting articles, stories, and poems. Examine the magazines in the library and ask the librarian's advice as to which you will be likely to find most useful and enjoyable. You are probably familiar with some or all of the following: The Junior Red Cross News, St. Nicholas, The Youth's Companion, The Saturday Evening Post, The National Geographic Magazine, The Scientific American, 'The Outlook, Good Housekeeping, The World's Work, The Literary Digest. What others do you sometimes read?

Perhaps you have had the experience of reading a story in some magazine, and later, when you wished to refer to it, of being unable to tell in which number or in which magazine you had read it. The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature will help you locate a story, poem, or article by title, author, or subject. It will also be helpful in showing you what has appeared in current magazines by certain authors or on certain subjects. Ask your teacher or the librarian to show you how to use The Readers' Guide.

The day was warm and sunny. The eaves dripped musically, and the icicles dropping from the roof fell occasionally with a pleasant crash. The snow grew slushy, and the bells of wood teams jingled merrily all the forenoon, as the farmers drove to 15 their timber-lands some miles away. The school room was un*See Silent and Oral Reading, page 40.

82

comfortably warm at times, and the master opened the outside. door. It was the eighth of January. During the afternoon recess, as the boys were playing in their shirt-sleeves, Lincoln called Milton's attention to a great cloud rising in the west and north. A vast, slaty-blue, seamless dome silent, portentous, with edges of silvery, frosty light.

"It's going to storm," said Milton. "It always does when we have a south wind and a cloud like that in the west."

When Lincoln set out for home, the sun was still shining, but 10 the edge of the cloud had crept, or more properly slid, across the sun's disk, and its light was growing cold and pale. In fifteen minutes more the wind from the south ceased-there was a moment of breathless pause and then, borne on the wings of the north wind, the streaming clouds of soft, large flakes of 15 snow drove in a level line over the homeward-bound scholars, sticking to their clothing and faces and melting rapidly. It was not yet cold enough to freeze, though the wind was colder. The growing darkness troubled Lincoln most.

By the time he reached home, the wind was a gale, the snow 20 a vast, blinding cloud, filling the air and hiding the road. Darkness came on instantly, and the wind increased in power, as though with the momentum of the snow. Mr. Stewart came home early, yet the breasts of his horses were already sheathed in snow. Other teamsters passed, breasting the storm, and call25 ing cheerily to their horses. One team, containing a woman and two men, neighbors living seven miles north, gave up the contest, and turned in at the gate for shelter, confident that they would be able to go on in the morning. In the barn, while rubbing the ice from the horses, the men joked and told stories in a 30 jovial spirit, with the feeling generally that all would be well by daylight. The boys made merry also, singing songs, popping corn, playing games, in defiance of the storm.

But when they went to bed, at ten o'clock, Lincoln felt some vague premonition of a dread disturbance of Nature, far beyond 35 any other experience in his short life. The wind howled like

ten thousand tigers, and the cold grew more and more intense. The wind seemed to drive in and through the frail tenement; water and food began to freeze within ten feet of the fire.

Lincoln thought the wind at that hour had attained its utmost 5 fury, but when he awoke in the morning, he saw how mistaken he had been. He crept to the fire, appalled by the steady, solemn, implacable clamor of the storm. It was like the roaring of all the lions of Africa, the hissing of a wilderness of serpents, the lashing of great trees. It benumbed his thinking, 10 it appalled his heart, beyond any other force he had ever known.

The house shook and snapped, the snow beat in muffled, rhythmic pulsations against the walls, or swirled and lashed upon the roof, giving rise to strange, multitudinous sounds; now dim and far, now near and all-surrounding; producing an effect 15 of mystery and infinite reach, as though the cabin were a helpless boat, tossing on an angry, limitless sea.

Looking out, there was nothing to be seen but the lashing of the wind and snow. When the men attempted to face it, to go to the rescue of the cattle, they found the air impenetrably filled 20 with fine, powdery snow mixed with the dirt caught up from the plowed fields by a terrific blast moving ninety miles an hour. It was impossible to see twenty feet, except at long intervals. Lincoln could not see at all when facing the storm. When he stepped into the wind, his face was coated with ice 25 and dirt, as by a dash of mud-a mask which blinded the eyes, and instantly froze to his cheeks. Such was the power of the wind that he could not breathe an instant unprotected. His mouth being once open, it was impossible to draw breath again without turning from the wind.

80

The day was spent in keeping warm and in feeding the stock at the barn, which Mr. Stewart reached by desperate dashes, during the momentary clearing of the air following some more than usually strong gust. Lincoln attempted to water the horses from the pump, but the wind blew the water out of the pail. 85 So cold had the wind become that a dipperful, thrown into the

air, fell as ice. In the house it became more and more difficult to remain cheerful, notwithstanding the family had fuel and food in abundance.

Oh, that terrible day! Hour after hour they listened to that 6 prodigious, appalling, ferocious uproar. All day Lincoln and Owen moved restlessly to and fro, asking each other, "Won't it ever stop?" To them the storm now seemed too vast, too ungovernable, ever again to be spoken to a calm, even by God. Himself. It seemed to Lincoln that no power whatever could 10 control such fury; his imagination was unable to conceive of a force greater than this war of wind or snow.

On the third day the family rose with weariness, and looked into each other's faces with a sort of horrified surprise. Not even the invincible heart of Duncan Stewart, nor the cheery 15 good nature of his wife, could keep a gloomy silence from settling down upon the house. Conversation was scanty; nobody laughed that day, but all listened anxiously to the invisible tearing at the shingles, beating against the door, and shrieking around the eaves. The frost upon the windows, nearly half an 20 inch thick in the morning, kept thickening into ice, and the light was dim at midday. The fire melted the snow on the windowpanes and upon the door, while around the keyhole and along every crack, frost formed. The men's faces began to wear a grim, set look, and the women sat with awed faces 25 and downcast eyes full of unshed tears, their sympathies going out to the poor travelers, lost and freezing.

The men got to the poor dumb animals that day to feed them; to water them was impossible. Mr. Stewart went down through the roof of the shed, the door being completely sealed 30 up with solid banks of snow and dirt. One of the guests had a wife and two children left alone in a small cottage six miles farther on, and physical force was necessary to keep him from setting out in face of the deadly tempest. To him the nights seemed weeks, and the days interminable, as they did to the 35 rest, but it would have been death to venture out.