解放军文职招聘考试First Snow

 First Snow

The first fall of snow is not only an event but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found? The very stealth, the eerie quietness of the thing makes it more magical. If all the snow fell at once in one shattering crash, awakening us in the mil-low of the night, the event would be robbed of its won­der. But it flutters down, soundless, hour after hour while we are asleep. Outside the closed curtains of the bedroom a vast transformation scene is taking place, just as if a myriad elves and brownies were at work, and we turn and yawn and stretch and know nothing about it. And then, what an extraordinary change it is! It is as if the house you are in had been dropped down in another continent. Even the inside, which has not been touched, seems different, every room appearing smaller and cozier, just as if some power were trying to turn it into a woodcutter's hut or a snug log cabin. Out­side, where the garden was yesterday, there is now a white and glistening level, and the village beyond is no longer your own familiar cluster of roofs but a village in an old German fairy-tale. . .

Now it has changed again. The snow is falling heavily, in great soft flakes, so that you can hardly see across the shallow valley, and the roofs are thick and the trees all bending, and the weathercock of the vil­lage church, still to be seen through the grey loaded air, has become some creature out of Hans Andersen. From my study, I can see the children flattening their noses against the nursery window, and there is running through my head a jangle of rhyme I used to repeat when I was a child and flattened my nose against the cold window watching the falling snow:

Snow, snow faster,

White alabaster!

Killing geese in Scotland,

Sending feathers here!