The snow came on the seventh day, and the cold cottage became positively Baltic with ice forming on the inside of the window and my breath coming in clouds. I forced myself to leave its meagre shelter to drag in peat from the stack outside, and I looked anew at these once-friendly Pentland Hills.
Now, they were stark and drear and bitter. Snow has the ability to harden the edges of hills and increase their apparent height, so I was a dwarf in a landscape fashioned by winter giants. Even with Mr. Kemp"s cloak on, I was cold, but there was no peat left in the house, and I had to gather fuel from the outside stack. That meant using a spade to break the surface frost and taking the blocks, piece by piece, inside the house. That was a hard job, my dears, so don"t let anybody tell you that coun
