Excerpt from Idylls of the Year

From the month's variety two days may linger awhile in the memory. Snow had fallen one night, and in the morning, looking down upon it, the eye ranged near and far over its whiteness. In the foreground, Where the shadow of the neighbour. Ing houses fell, it was just tinged with blue. Across the road the branches of trees showed black and definite. Beyond their wont. Then came the Open expanse, with the nearer rigs and furrows vanishing from sight in the sweep of the rising ground. The blue-grey of the shadows inthe furrow-bottoms, and the pink which, from a sunrise cloud, just tinged the rigs, merged further off into a light-filled, delicate tone of dull yellow. In the distance, banks of trees showed black, and white roofed clusters of houses had walls of dark grey or of red. These gave the only strong and assured colour in what was else a wide harmony of ethereal tints. The sky just over the horizon was of palest yellow and green; then came a few hazy clouds of dull yellow, and above all the light blue of the clear upper air. Next night the air grew warmer, and by the morning the White snow mantle was gone, save that a hundred shreds and patches of it still lay in the dips and hollows of the Open land. But the rising wind, out of the mild south at first, scattered even these shreds. Veering then to the west, it grew steadily in volume. It came hurtling and singing noisily through the tree-barriers that fringed the road as one fared northwards, plunging and leaping upon one at every brief gap. Routing out dead leaves by fifties and hundreds, whether fromquiet lurking-holes or from branches one had thought long stripped bare, it set them whirling and eddying over the roadway. When one turned aslant On to the open moorland, leav ing behind the shrill screaming Of the wires overhead and the dull half music Of the grinding tree-branches, forthwith it had one in its clutches: one must bend down sideways against it, forcing a devious path through its Opposition. At first its rush was a little broken by the slope Of the ground; but beyond that it surged up with a renewed freedom and a madder joy. Then one faced into the very heart Of it, from lust Of its battle-play, fighting with it step after step, still plodding slowly for ward, till at last the sheltering houses were reached and breath could be drawn at quiet ease once more.

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