Within a very short time we found ourselves in the midst of snow-drifts, out of which preceding trains had had to cut their way. Gangs of men were clearing the track, flinging up the snow on both sides of the road in solid shovelfuls. The white _débris_ was piled up six and eight feet high, where the snow had settled down in great drifts upon the line. “One train was stuck here five hours yesterday,” said the guard. “It is the heaviest snow in my experience.”
Moving onwards once more, we travelled through a world of snow: through prairie-lands, where the wind came tearing after us, waited upon by scudding clouds of snow, that rose like spray, to fall in its wake as if the prairie were a snow-sea; past forests of oak, with the brown leaves clinging to the tough branches, that moved with a sturdy kind of protest against the boisterous wind; across great rivers, that were closed to navigation. Now and then skating-parties flitted by us in sheltered bends of the great silent water-ways, and at intervals the sun would burst out upon the white world and fill it with icy diamonds.
We met a train with five engines. It came plunging along,—a veritable procession of locomotives. The foremost of them were mighty ploughs, to charge the growing snow-drifts we had left behind us. By and by the sun went down, and when our lamps were lighted, and it was night, as we thought, we looked out to see one of the magnificent sunsets which had been puzzling for many weeks the wise men of both worlds,—a wide red glare in the sky, stretching away as far as the eye could see, with a white foreground, the line of the horizon dotted with the dark configuration of farm buildings and forest trees.
At three o’clock in the morning we arrived at St. Louis, and on the next day I walked across the ice-locked Mississippi. In a street adjacent to the wharves, where steamers and boats of all kinds were frozen up, were the remains of an old hotel, that had been burnt out a short time previously. The thermometer stood at twenty degrees below zero. A first glance at the place, from a short distance, showed a house with what looked like packs of wool thrust out at the windows, and great bundles and entanglements of wool hanging down to the ground from eaves and window-sills. On examination these strange appearances turned out to be excrescences of ice,—part of the water that had been poured upon the flames by the fire-brigades, whose engines had literally been frozen up in the street. Inside the devastated buildings the ruins were hung with icicles many feet in length, with others rising to meet them, mimicking the stalactites and stalagmites of the Cheddar caverns, in England, not to mention the more famous caves of Kentucky.