frosts. It is not only
"Beautiful snow, beautiful snow,"
but useful too. God sends it, as
well as rain and sunshine, on a kindly errand.
Snow is an emblem of purity. "Though your sins were as scarlet,
they shall be whiter than snow." The colour can never be
got out of scarlet material; scarlet rags will only make the pinkish
blotting paper, or with a tinge of red. What a change from scarlet
to white; yes, and whiter than snow.
What a lesson from a snowflake! It is the power of little things;
despise nothing because it is small. Snowflakes are very small,
but it is the multitude of them, and their continuous fall, that
gives them the power. Even whilst writing this there has been
a fall of snow for a few hours, blocking up the thoroughfares,
stopping the traffic of the streets, throwing into disorder between
four and five millions of people in this great city of London.
What God can do when "He casteth forth His snow like wool."
Who can stop Him? How puny are our efforts! -
An avalanche is an immense body of snow overhanging the great
precipice, sometimes more than one hundred feet thick; overbalancing,
falls or slides down, carrying all before it. In one of the Catholic
cantons of Switzerland they cut away the trees above their village,
and an avalanche came down and destroyed the whole village, therefore
they are forbidden to cut down any trees above the villages or
towns, that they may form a snow break. The slightest noise, such
as a shout, or letting fall an ice axe, will set the snow in motion.
Noise causes a vibration of the air. In certain conditions of
the snow the Alpine guides put their fingers to their lips, as
much as to say, "Don't speak.
There is also the rolling avalanche. Snow detached and set in
motion, as it rolls along, gathers the snow as it rolls over it,
and increases its bulk and speed, and carries everything before
it.
It is snowflakes that keep the highest mountains in Switzerland
covered with snow, and which form the great glaciers containing
millions of tons, and which are travelling at the rate of about
a foot per day, for a ladder that was left in the snow came out
at the bottom of the glacier more than forty years after, also
the body of a guide who fell down a crevasse and lost his life,
came out at the bottom of the glacier with the colour in his face,
as the immense weight of the snow is always pressing it down,
and from observation is continually travelling downward. And often
the glacier, being very wide, and the space between the high rocks
through which the glacier passes very narrow, it presses
