There was a gurgling, a trickling and oozing, all abroad. The trees dripped, their masses of snow slid off; the shovelled-up barricades in the streets, the pallid layers carpeting the meadows, disappeared alike, though not all at once, they had lain too heavy for that. Then what lovely apparitions of the springtime revealed themselves! It was unheard-of, fairylike. There lay the broad meadows, with the cone-shaped summit of the Schwarzhorn towering in the background, still in snow, and close in on the right the snow-buried Skaletta glacier. The common scene of pasture and hayrick was still snow-clad, though with a thin and scanty coat, that everywhere showed bare patches of dark earth or dry grass sucking through. Yet after all, the cousins found, what a curious sort of snow it was! Thick in the distance, next the wooded slopes, but in the foreground a mere sprinkling at most; the stretches of discoloured and winter-killed grass were dappled or sprigged with white. They looked closer, they bent down surprised⁠—it was not snow, it was flowers: snow-flowers, a snow of flowers, short-stemmed chalices of white and palest blue. They were crocuses, no less; sprung by millions from the soggy meadow-bottom, and so thick that one actually confused them with the snow into which they merged.