 By nightfall, or at least before the sun sheds another glimmering smile upon us,  the street and our little garden will be heaped with  mountain snow-drifts. The soil, already frozen for weeks  past, is prepared to sustain whatever burden may be laid  upon it; and, to a northern eye, the landscape will lose  its melancholy bleakness and acquire a beauty of its own,  when Mother Earth, like her children, shall have put on the fleecy garb of her winter's wear.  The cloud-spirits  are slowly weaving her white mantle. As yet, indeed,  there is barely a rime like hoarfrost over the brown surface of the street; the withered green of the grass-plat is still discernible; and the slated roofs of the houses do but begin to look gray, instead of black.  All the snow that has yet fallen within the circumference of my view, were it heaped up together, would hardly equal the hillock of a grave