A heavy snowfall in the middle of the twelfth lunar month dressed the Qiantang Chen Clan's great Manor in silver and white. The green hills wore white heads, and the fields stretched boundlessly, like a kingdom of ice and snow. As far as the eye could see, heaven and earth were white. Only on Mingsheng Lake did the snow fall without a trace, its deep waters embracing all warmth and cold, all clamor and the silence of ages.
Autumn's harvest was stored for winter. The Chen clansmen and the protected households and tenant households settled around Chen Family Cove had little farmwork left to do. Families young and old sat around their hearths, sewing, patching, and repairing farm tools. New Year supplies had also been distributed from Chen Family Cove: fish, meat, rice, millet, oil, salt, cloth, and silk, all in abundance. The Chen Clan had already settled their taxes for them, so they need not worry about crafty clerks and slippery officials knocking at their doors to squeeze them dry. Such were the benefits of sheltering beneath the Great Clans. The Chen Clan was especially generous and kind to those beneath it, so its protected households, tenant households, and hired workers all found savor in their lives and felt they had found a place to settle and make their way in the world.
There was still a busy place amid the ice and snow: the smithy on the Chen Clan Manor. Purple smoke curled above roaring furnace fires, and the clear clang, clang, clang of hammering iron carried far. When spring came next year, the Manor would need large quantities of plows, harrows, hoes, sickles, and other farm tools. Lai De, son of Lai Fu, the chief steward of Chen Family Cove, had invented a Back-and-Forth Bellows. It was