The snow was falling in heavy slashing sheets, and a December snowstorm in the New Hampshire hills means something more serious than a storm in city streets or even an equal downfall upon more level meadows and plains. Yet on this winter afternoon, about an hour before twilight and along the base of a hill where a rough road wandered between tall cedar and pine trees and low bushes and shrubs, there sounded continually above the snow's silencing two voices, sometimes laughing, occasionally singing a brief line or so, but more often talking. Accompanying them always was a steady jingling of bells.