Once they sank into a deep drift, and came out as white as millers are, when the stones are grinding, and once they slipped on the hard smooth ice where the marsh–water was frozen, and their faggots fell out of their bundles, and they had to pick them up and bind them together again, and once they thought that they had lost their way, and a great terror seized on them, for they knew that the Snow is cruel to those who sleep in her arms.