But this illusion was speedily dispelled. The
window-ledge was piled high with snow. Snow filled the air, whirled
about by a gale that was banging the window-shutters and raging exactly
like a Northern tempest.
It swirled the snow about in waves and dark masses interspersed with
rifts of light, dark here and luminous there. The Rip-Raps were lost to
view. Out at sea black clouds hung in the horizon, heavy reinforcements
for the attacking storm. The ground was heaped with the still
fast-falling snow--ten inches deep he heard it said when he descended.
The Baltimore boat had not arrived, and could not get in. The waves at
the wharf rolled in, black and heavy, with a sullen beat, and the sky
shut down close to the water, except when a sudden stronger gust of wind
cleared a luminous space for an instant. Stormbound: that is what the
Hygeia was--a winter resort without any doubt.
The hotel was put to a test of its qualities. There was no getting
abroad in such a storm. But the Hygeia appeared at its best in this
emergency. The long glass corridors, where no one could venture in the
arctic temperature, gave, nevertheless, an air of brightness and
cheerfulness to the interior, where big fires blazed, and the company
were exalted into good-fellowship and gayety--a decorous Sunday gayety
--by the elemental war from which they were securely housed.
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