Mr Robert Lynd once said of Jane Austen'scharacters:"They are people in whose lives aslight fall of snow is an event."Even at the risk of appearing to this fair and witty reviewer as another Mr Woodhouse, I must insist that last night's fall of snow here was an event. I was nearly as excited about it this morning as the children, whom I found all looking through the window at the magic outside and talking away as excitedly as if Christmas had suddenly come round again. The fact is, however, that the snow was as strange and fascinating to me as it was to them. It is the first fall we have had here this winter, and last year I was out of the country, sweating in a hot climate, during the snowy season, so that it really does seem an age since I saw the ground so fantastically carpeted.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 magic, then where is it to be found? The very secrecy and quietness of the thing makes it more magical.