a shorter lasting of it. Less light
meant longer work; so it was thirty days and thirty nights before he got
it anywhere near finished. No, it wasn't fully done. How could it be?
The Summer Fellows never finished anything complete, you know.

But 'twas beautiful, just the same, all shimmering cold blue, and white
like apple blossoms that have blanched and are ready to fall. And there
was mile upon mile of it. It was wondrously fine, finer than anything
Andy had done until then. It was really his master-bit, as he had said
it would be. And he would have kept on and woven more, but--

He looked of a sudden out his window, one morning, in the gray, and he
could not see that Summer anywhere!

He went to the door and shaded his eyes with his hands and peered over
miles and miles of hills; and far down one gusset of valley he saw her
dull-green robes a-trailing. He cried for joy. (You know--when you have
lost a thing that you loved and found it again.)

Famished and weak he was, but he gathered the miles and pounds of that
shroud in his arms and started down the roads and over the hills after
her, calling till his heart would break and his voice went dry:

"Wait for me, lass. I've woven your shroud! Wait for me, lass. I'm
coming! I've your beautiful, downy shroud here--"

And he would stumble along, so weak the sweat broke out on him and he
scarce could lift a leg. But with the shroud over his arm, he went on
and on and on as best he could; his long, ragged gray hair a-flying and
a wild glare in his eyes and those eyes fast fixed on the Summer as she
slipped away.

'Twas in this fashion he came to the summit of a foothill and could go
no further. The cold had smitten to his bones, though the sweat still
stood on his skin. He dropped down on the ground and slept a bit--but
not sound asleep, and in his sleep he had awful dreams which made him
wake.

He started up, crying weakly: "I have your shroud, lass. Wait for me!"

And then he noticed--_It was snowing_!

The soft white flakes he saw, dropping upon the earth like light years,
my boy, years that themselves will be dropping and dropping forever
and ever by tens of hundreds of thousands of millions and covering
everything, all we do, all we are or were, far and wide with a white
sameness--a big mound here where a Hero Worked, a flatness there where
a zero worked--but all white, and all the same.

Andy put his hand to his forehead as if in a dream, and then--let me