oo
soft.

After that I just sat there for a while and looked ahead. But I saw only
the whirl, whirl, whirl of the snow slanting across my field of vision.
You are closed in by it as by insecure and ever receding walls when you
drive in a snowstorm. If I had met a team, I could not have seen it, and
if my safety had depended on my discerning it in time to turn out of the
road, my safety would not have been very safe indeed. But I could rely
on my horses: they would hear the bells of any encountering conveyance
long enough ahead to betray it to me by their behaviour. And should I
not even notice that, they would turn out in time of their own accord:
they had a great deal of road sense.

Weariness overcame me. In the open the howling and whistling of the wind
always acts on me like a soporific. Inside of a house it is just the
reverse; I know nothing that will keep my nerves as much on edge and
prevent me as certainly from sleeping as the voices at night of a gale
around the buildings. I needed something more definite to look at than
that prospect ahead. The snow was by this time piling in on the seat at
my right and in the box, so as to exclude all drafts except from below I
felt that as a distinct advantage.

Without any conscious intention I began to peer out below the slanting
edge of the left side-curtain and to watch the sharp crest-wave of
snow-spray thrown by the curve of the runner where it cut into the
freshly accumulating mass. It looked like the wing-wave thrown to either
side by the bow of a power boat that cuts swiftly through quiet water.
From it my eye began to slip over to the snow expanse. The road was
wide, lined with brush along the fence to the left. The fields beyond
had no very large open areas--windbreaks had everywhere been spared
out when the primeval forest had first been broken into by the early
settlers. So whatever the force of the wind might be, no high drift
layer could form. But still the snow drifted. There was enough coming
down from above to supply material even on such a narrow strip as a road
allowance. It was the manner of this drifting that held my eye and my
attention at last.

All this is, of course, utterly trivial. I had observed it myself a
hundred times before. I observe it again to-day at this very writing,
in the first blizzard of the season. It always has a strange fascination
for me; but maybe I need to apologize for setting it down in writing.

The wind would send th