Date: 1871
cavaliers, on the black oak wainscoating of old Essex Halls.  The snow lay deep on the frozen ground, the fences were buried, and the roads impas sable : in some counties railway traffic was stopped altogether, and several times the slowly labouring engines, ploughing their way through a blinding storm of stealthily fall ing snow, had come to a dead stop, and obliged their male passengers to get out, and fall to with shovel and pickaxe to clear the lines from some heavy drift before they could proceed.  But it was awfully jolly for all that, said the young people, who looked up their hockey sticks, cleaned their skates, and set off in the joyous sparkle of the fresh, frosty, win ter morning, for a long day's skating on some sedge bound pond, which the sweepers had been busy at since daybreak.