Country Life
By IAN NIALL
OLD-FASHIONED winters belong to those engravings depicting frozen ponds with skaters blissfully gliding in arm-locked pairs and knickerbockered boys and smaller children cluttering up every corner. That it was often so is the obvious implication, and who is "there to deny it? The atmosphere is traditional and weather records are both dull and incomplete. This morning a traveller arrived from somewhere two counties distant telling of a well-known hill where, but recently, the ice had diverted no fewer than twelve cars to the ditch. Only by the greatest good fortune had the traveller himself negotiated the hazard. This account immediately stimulated Old Bob's memories of a day long gone when six horses attached to a brewer's wagon came slithering down another slope with a dozen men on a rope striving to hold it back. How much colder was the hand of winter! How dramatic the scene! Old Bob's mental images flitted on until all at once he recalled the significant moment in the catastrophe of the brewer's wagon. At the bend, when the men were strung out like beads on a string, the wheels locked, the fore and hind feet of the great horses dangerously grouped together, there was a loud cracking sound and off toppled part of the load. A barrel and then another whirled away through a fence and over a gully to smash into a hundred pieces. The ale froze solid in the already frozen stream and later some of the men chipped themselves a dr:nk. When? Oh, long, long ago.
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