noon
But winter was full half the year . The snow began at Thanksgiving , and fell snow upon snow till Fast Day , thawing between the storms , and packing harder and harder against the break-up in the spring , when it covered the ground in solid levels three feet high , and lay heaped in drifts , that defied the sun far into May . When it did not snow , the weather was keenly clear , and commonly very still . Then the landscape at noon had a stereoscopic glister under the high sun that burned in a heaven without a cloud , and at setting stained the sky and the white waste with freezing pink and violet . On such days the farmers and lumbermen came in to the village stores , and made a stiff and feeble stir about their doorways , and the school children gave the street a little life and color , as they went to and from the Academy in their red and blue woollens . Four times a day the mill , the shrill wheeze of whose saws had become part of the habitual silence , blew its whistle for the hands to begin and leave off work , in blasts that seemed to shatter themselves against the thin air . But otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed .