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48
Module 1. FICTION
UNIT 8
J. B. Priestley,
FIRST SNOW (excerpt)
The first fall of snow is not only an event but it is a
magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and
wake up to find yourself in another, quite different, and
if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?
The very stealth, the eerie quietness, of the thing makes
it more magical. If all the snow fell at once in one shatter
ing crash, awakening us in the middle of the night, the
event would be robbed of its wonder. But it flutters down,
soundlessly, hour after hour while we are asleep. Outside
the closed curtains of the bedroom a vast transformation
scene is taking place, just as if a myriad elves and brown
ies were at work, and we turn and yawn and stretch and
know nothing about it. And then, what an extraordinary
change it is! It is as if the house you are in had been dropped
down in another continent. Even the inside, which has
not been touched, seems different, every room appearing
smaller and cosier, just as if some power were trying to
turn it into a woodcutter’s hut or a snug logcabin. Out
side, where the garden was yesterday, there is now a white
and glistening level, and the village beyond is no longer
your own familiar cluster of roofs but a village in an old
German fairytale. You would not be surprised to learn
that all the people there, the spectacled postmistress, the
cobbler, the retired schoolmaster, and the rest, had suf
fered a change too and had become queer elvish beings,
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