Ice and snow are to you mere playthings; and you long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make your stomach ache.

And I dare say you have said, like many another boy, on a bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it would be always winter!" You little knew for what you asked.

You little thought what the earth would soon be like, if it were always winter,--if one sheet of ice on the pond glued itself on to the bottom of the last sheet, till the whole pond was a solid mass,--if one snow-fall lay upon the top of another snow-fall till the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields, tearing the trees up by their roots, burying gradually house, church, and village, and making this place for a few thousand years what it was many thousand years ago.

Good-bye then, after a very few winters, to bees, and butterflies, and singing-birds, and flowers; and good-bye to all vegetables, and fruit, and bread; good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes.
You would have, if you were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish and seals, if any came near enough to be caught.

You would have to live in a word, if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic regions, and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times when it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and Finchampstead.