A GARDEN OF SNOW.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 133, 12 June 1909, Page 10

A GARDEN OF SNOW.

I If in midwinter you go due east by train from Berlin you must either bo a brazened optimist or a sensitive impressionist to resist the sense of gloom, amounting almost to terror, that forces itself upon the senses before you have travelled an hour. As soon as the clatter of the Berlin streets and the queer sights in the barrack-yards where the troops are drilling have ceased you enter what seems a country of dreary desolation. Endlessly the pall of snoxi stretches across the plain, from grey into grey ; here and there a hideously ugly one-storoyed peasant-house or a cluster of shanties breaks the monotony, or on tho far horizon a thick black line suggests the border of a wood. The rest is all a dead level of snow, with perhaps a sort of antediluvian plough stunk fast in the middle of a furrow, as if the ploughman had fled panicstricken, or fallen dead beside it. Of living creatures there is no sight nor i sound ; not a cat or dog about the homesteads ; not a puff or curl of smoke from the chimneys. Only the crows fly overhead, forming sharp black patches against the leaden greyness, and cawing hoarsely, hungrily, in their heavy, dreary flight. | At first it apnals and frightens you, this circle of almost elemental emptiness, lying so close around the consciously strong and pushing and arti- j ncial life of the Berlin which not many .years ago was. provincial to the backbone, and is now masterfully and rather magnificently pressing forward to take j •its rank among the great capitals of the West. Then, as you are shot deeper into it, this flat and desolate land begins to cast over you its strange and subtle spelL Over the long roads with their sad silence ; the brooding stillness of the far-off woods ; the white immensity of the fields from the sandy soil ot which the peasant, with incessant toil, wrenches the harvest of bread, the very spirit of the visionary North has spread its wings. This spirit is melancholy and resigned when it turns its sad eyes to the earth, but upon the foundations ot that very earth it builds a gorgeous structure, a palace of dreams, and as you penetrate deep into the wintry region the dreams weave their spells around you till after a while ymi begin to wish that, you might go on Tor ever and for ever, sitting by the window of the eastward train. I The gods having left just a spark of practical sense within me, after an hour's contemplation of the scene, I tumbled from the train into the snowstorm, when tha long double name of the station for which I was bound was shouted some where outside. The dream was over, and the reality was the colder because the woman going to Kustrin in my over-heated compartment had strictly forbidden me to open the window by as much as a bare inch. The train must have run a good way beyond the station, for after I had watched the grey mist far, far away swallow up the last carriage, I found that my wraps, my box, and I stood in a wilderness of snow, away from all human habitations, outside the circle of any human life. It seemed incredible, impossible. If I waited a minute the porter would' come, and the ticket-col-lector, and show me the way to the Klein-Bahn, the narrow-guage railway by which I knew I would have to get into the " Switzerland of the Mark." So I sat on^the box and waited. But saowflakes as big as full-blown guelderroses were thickly fallings and I remembered that the tiains on the Klein-Bahn were few and far between, and the one by which I was to travel started in ten minutes. Wherefore, leaving all my earthly goods in the desert and the snow, I started to walk back to where the train had come from, and arrived finally, and in a temper that had no relation to dreams, in front of a giant at the door of a grey and ugly house, to whom I had to 'say a few very plain words before we oame to a satisfactory understanding. He said they were not accustomed to people swooping upon them like whirlwinds, and I explained that I had no taste for adding to the decorative features of the station with the double name by being turned into a snowy Patience on a Monument. He laughed jerked his thumb over his shoulder. " Across the bridge, and there is your trainj and I'll bring your luggage." They had put a sort of gigantic acro-bat-ladder over tho level-crossing. It was as high as a house, with slippery rungs, between which, as you mounted, you looked into whirling snow and on the rails upon which you would fall if your foot slipped on one of the rungs. Crossing the bridge was a dream turned into a nightmare, out of which you woke to the jingle of a little bell. And then you found yourself sitting in the little train that had a cooking-stove in the centre, and two tallow-dips in the roof, and was very hot and perfumed by the dreadful cigars which all the men were stnoking, in the midst of whom you were sitting round the rusty cookingstove. With a view of getting on to the roof of the train I asked how long it took to reach B , ray destination, and one man grinned and threw his cigar into the fire, and said "Seventeen minutes if we don't stick in the snow. ' ' We did not "stick," but loitered long on tha road, which gave me the chance of watching a wonderful transformationscene. The bleak plains disappeared almost as soon as the little train began to potter along ; the air became dry and very cold ; the whirling snowflakes turned into showers of glittering diamonds, through which you saw the pine-forest rise in shadowy whiteness beneath black heavy branches high abovo. And, all at once, there flamed up in that haunt of wintry silence a great big tulip-coloured fire, causing the old pine-stems round it to look as if they were made of rough burnished gold, and the figures of the charcoal-burners, in high peaked caps and boots reaching to their thighs, line mediaeval mystery-men. It seemed a pity when the tinkling bell announced the end of the journey. The, face of an old friend greeted me at the queer little station, where cabs are unknown, and whence we tramped happily through the snow and through a village sunk in sleep. A dog sat in the middle of the road, and that was the only living creature we saw on the twenty minutes' w r alk to where, between the orchards and the pine woods, a place called Wilhelmshohe, a sort of relation to the Berlin Hospiz as far as comfort and kindliness and all things pleasant are concerned, receives you into its peaceful shelter. And, once there, all the burden of the world and of the winter, all the restlessness and the fever and puzzle of existence, disappear and are no more. I never knew a place of such utter peace, such graciously simple life and thought, such sweet and pure content, both in the house itsell and iv all the district. The old pines looked into the back windows, and the front windows looked upon the white orchards, the rippling lake turned to blue ice, and a hill country partly under cultivation and partly crowned with pines. When you watched the- sunset through the large double windows you taw lemon-tinted light shine between the stems oil the fair horizon, and the West shone with the glory of rose-rubies and amethyst and clear beryl-stones ; and over all the' snowy earth there crept a warm pink blush. When day daw-ned a gentle tap came on your bedroom door, and with tho light, fwnj an invisible lantern in -the corridor- f{UlmjL-Hp.pa him .frpnj- bebiadi.

a giant bearing a basket of wood andl fuel stole in on tiptoe to light a fire in the white-tiled stove,, rising, with its shining little brass doors to the ceiling of the lofty room. He made less noise than any lire-lighter in my experience, and in three minutes he had vanished, leaving behind a scent of pine-logs burning, a glow of red from one of the little brass doors of the stove, and a general sense of utter peace and rest. An apple-cheeked village lassie, strong as a young horse, and intelligent and prompt, came in. an hour later with fragi'ant coffee and crisp little rolls and butter like golden cream, shaped into grapes and walnuts, and told you the sun was shining and the horsekeeper in the village had telephoned to ask would we like to go for a slerjh-drivq ; the snowplough had been at work, and the roads were perfect. Long before the sleigh-bells round the collars of the two splendid horses which pretended to work at drawing the little sleigh were heard at the door, the sunlight and a something inspiring, enlivening, in the blue morning air drew you out into the open, and once your feet were 6et upon the forest paths beyond the little summer-residences that remind you of places on the Gulf of Finland, where half the population of St. Petersburg live amphibious lives from June to September, you felt that ordinary life, where people felt hot or cold, where they fought for bread or fame, where ambitions stirred and intrigues poisoned them, had nothing to do with existence in this great white Garden of 'Winter. The snow lay deep, and with a golden shimmer, all around, and on the edge of the path, under the old trees, each little flower that had died on its stalk had come to new life again, wearing a crown or circlet of glittering, frozen snow, and swaying in the breeze just as it had done when the midsummer sun gave it its first short life. Glitter and sparkle and nodding snow-flowers, as far as eye could reach, and when you looked up to where the sky shone in clear deep azure behind the tree-tops, you saw that the pines also had blossomed out, and that the snow, instead of lying in a smooth, soft cover upon them, had formed into shapes of great white roses and magnolias, millions of them, high up there, midway between heaven and earth. And not a sign of life to disturb the deep silence, except far, far away the crowing of a cock or the sound of an axe among the timber. Not a human footmark on the snow, but everywhere i n the snow, across your path and beside it, the marks of the creatures of the wood, which hunger was driving from their strongholds. The little pads of hares and rabbits were everywhere, and the cloven hoof of the deer j birds, large and small, had alighted and run hither and thither, and now and then there was the mark of the enemy, the sportingdog-, who had put all the timid things to flight. Once a flight of partridges rose from a field, and once a peasant-boy came whistling down the path. Then silence again, all through the long blue morning ; and so 1 on, day after day, with a sledge-drive over the hills and far away as the most exciting event, and for the rest peace, perfect peace. — ''H.F.," in the Westminster Gazette.