He gazed through the window, watching the snowflakes whirl out of the blackness into the light that radiated from his room, following them as they curved past the panes and out of sight again. Large clots occasionally caught on the glass; began to melt, then dragged downward until they disappeared into a trail of water. Fleece piled up into triangles in the corners of the windowsill, slowly creeping up over the edges of the bottom panes, rounding off the window's squareness. There they hung, shining glazier's points, with their pale faces flattened against the panes, peering in at the light on the table and the warm fire beyond.

A gust shook one of the curious triangles from its perch and scattered its particles into the dark, spreading a mist of snow across the lower panes. Then the flakes fell into step again and circled past his eyes as they had before. A big flake flew out of nowhere at the pane near his hand and violently flattened itself against the transparency. It held on desperately, its edges vanishing. Then suddenly it loosened its grip on the smooth surface and catapulted down along a stream of its own moisture. And more, smaller flakes blew out of the night and hung to the glass, looking in at him.

Clinging to this unseen, vertical barrier, they might have been little animals-silver mosquitoes on a screen, countless miniature human beings, struggling to keep from falling and at the same moment stare at a great wonder, clutching at the bare face of a cliff to find support where there was not a root or weed to grasp. There was the momentary retention of position in the sphere of the light, then the same abrupt relaxation of their unaccountable grip and the rapid descent as in the lives of men he had read about, like Shelley, perhaps, or Chatterton . . .

There was no sound. None from the puff that switched a cloud of frost against the panes. The innumerable snow moths spread themselves on the pane in rhythmic silence, dissolving, vanishing. Their motions were real quiet, against a background of silence. It was real quiet because their collisions with the glass should have broken the stillness; instead, the absence of a sound where there should have been one made a crevice in the night, transforming it into a riot of noise by contrast. Reflected in the glass he could see the flames in the fireplace lick across the wood, hushing its crackle . . .

Things had come to pass before his eyes; the events inspired him. Because the actors in the tale had been persistent. And mute.