TALE XIII - HERMIONE; THE RUSSIAN PRINCESS

Summary

“A gracious innocent soul;”

Winter's Tale.

Thicker aud thicker fell the snow. Fiercely keen blew the Northern wind, heaping the drifts into crannies and gullies, then whirling them far and wide, as if in disdainful caprice. The gloomy fir-trees were all behung with mocking wreaths of sheeted white, that the next blast flung abroad in scattered showers. The murky sky lowered sullenly above all, grey, and cheerless, and hopeless; as a man,—setting his teeth hard, and facing the rough inclemency as he best might,—cast his eyes up towards the heavens' unpromising aspect, and then looked around him, with an air that plainly bespoke his having lost his way amid the solitudes of this primæval pine-forest. A bleak and desolate monotony met his view on all sides; the same endless rows of tall straight black boles, crowned by funereal branches; the same blank, trackless waste of snow under-foot; the same grey veil of mist, and lead-colored uniformity of sky, and falling flakes, overhead.

Something very like a muttered curse upon his own folly, broke from the lips of the man, as he turned in bewildered uncertainty from each new attempt to retrace the path by which he had entered the forest.

He might have been a denizen of the place, for the coarseness and even squalor of his clothing.