"I walked on until I came to the steps of the schoolroom, in a brown study, with the crisp new-fallen snow crunching beneath my tread, and I had nearly given a second edition of Doctor Soorock's downfall before I fairly awoke to the routine of this sublunary world, and betook myself to the unromantic occupation of lighting the fire. I sat down and took up the bellows, but it seemed I had forgotten to make use of them; for there I had been cowering by the ingle-cheek near an hour, pondering in my own mind what the footprints could mean, and quite unconscious all this time that the morning, in place of getting lighter, had settled down very dark. The wind had also suddenly risen, and the branches of the auld elm that overshadowed the schoolhouse were groaning and rasping on the ridge of the roof; and Betty Mutchkin's sign, that hung on the opposite side of the road from a long projecting beam, as if it had been a flag, was swinging and creaking on its rusty hinges before the angry gusts, as they tore down the small valley. At length I was startled by the fury with which a hail shower dashed against the window at my lug, utterly demolishing in a minute the sheet of brown paper with which, until the village glazier sobered, and got a pane from Edinburgh, I had _battered_ up the fracture occasioned by Dr Soorock's cane, when he was humbling himself, and bowing down before the golden coronet on auld Earl M----'s carriage.
"'Dear me,' said I, 'what a day! It's but gloomy without, and I'm no sure that it's very cheery within; for there's a weight that has been lang accumulating at my heart, and now it has grown heavy, heavy. The lift will clear, and the spring will come again, and all nature, as if risen from the grave, as we puir deevils hope to do, will resume its primeval beauty; but a seared heart, a blighted soul,'--and I gave a heavy sigh, while the very bellows on my knees seemed suddenly to collapse of themselves, as if in sympathy, and to puff out an echo to my groan.
"I felt a rough shake on the shoulder. 'What _are_ you sitting groaning at there, Dominie?' said my father, who had entered unseen and unheard--'what are you grunting and graning at the fireside on such a morning as this for, Saunders, when you should have had a bit cheery fire in the ingle for the drookit school-callants to dry themselves at, instead of dreaming with the bellows on your knee, and the fire black out?'