This house had three lopsided upper storeys, mounting in tiers so that each overhung the street more loweringly than the one below. As the upper storeys of the house opposite also did this, there was the merest silver of navy sky, twinkling stars and flickering snowflakes to be seen if one looked upwards. The door was a leaning green door with a kind of blue radiance on it reflected from the snow. One mounted to it by three little steps, hollowed in the middle by countless generations of step-climbers, and the snow was packed so close on them and so polished by all the recent passage over it that it was slippery as ice and you had to cling to the knocker. There was a window beside the door, divided into countless little panes. An orange light glowed through, but one could not see in, the thick glass was so wimpled. An arrangement of icicles hung, very decorative indeed, from the eaves; they must have been dripping a lot of water at tire instant the ice came. The wagoner banged the knocker (it was shaped like a little man warming his hands at a fire) and behind us the horses poorrurrr’d and snorted plumes into the air.

I was so extremely cold that after the door had been knocked on, the boundaries of my mind and body faded. I swam in blue cold, light-headed, dizzy I suppose from my eventual descent from the perpetual wagon-jolt, and was only aware after they were over of the steps inside the house coming to the other side of the door. As soon as it was opened. I fell inside like an unthinking nail drawn straight to the magnet of warmth.

Inside the door there was a hot red passage.

I leaned against the wall while my wagoner and the peat merchant, holding a torch, greeted each other and I think I was introduced.

Minutes later, just as I had begun to thaw and to realize that the passage was by no means hot except by contrast with outside, and that the redness was only the colour of the clay forming the walls, I was pushed into a room, with an order to get some life into my veins, and the two men went out again to unload the peat.

The room was really hot.

An immense fire roared in an even more immense fireplace, like a soot-backed cavern, at one end of the room. This was the first time for nearly a year, ever since I left the tower of my childhood, that I have seen a fireplace. At first, faced with such irresponsible and incessant movements, my eyes ached. I thought the whole room was leaping with the flames.

On fur mats in front of the fire sat a woman and a girl of about ten.

The woman lifted her eyebrows and stared a question at me.