time that this grade which
sprang here out of the bush opened up to the east a vista into a
seemingly endless distance. Twenty-six times I had gone along this piece
of it, but thirteen times it had been at night, and thirteen times I
had been facing west, when I went back to the scene of my work. So I
had never looked east very far. This morning, however, in this strange
light, which was at this very hour undergoing a subtle change that I
could not define as yet, mile after mile of road seemed to lift itself
up in the far away distance, as if you might drive on for ever through
fairyland. The very fact of its straightness, flanked as it was by the
rows of frosted trees, seemed like a call. And a feeling that is very
familiar to me--that of an eternity in the perpetuation of whatever may
be the state I happen to be in, came over me, and a desire to go on and
on, for ever, and to see what might be beyond...

But then the turn into the bushy trail was reached. I did not see the
slightest sign of it on the road. But Dan seemed infallible--he made
the turn. And again I was in Winter's enchanted palace, again the slight
whirl in the air that our motion set up made the fairy tracery of
the boughs shower down upon me like snow white petals of flowers, so
delicate that to disturb the virginity of it all seemed like profaning
the temple of the All-Highest.

But then I noticed that I had not been the first one to visit the
woods. All over their soft-napped carpet floor there were the restless,
fleeting tracks of the snowflake, lacing and interlacing in lines and
loops, as if they had been assembled in countless numbers, as no doubt
they had. And every track looked like nothing so much as like that kind
of embroidery, done white upon white, which ladies, I think; call the
feather stitch. In places I could clearly see how they had chased and
pursued each other, running, and there was a merriness about their
spoors, a suggestion of swiftness which made me look up and about to
see whether they were not wheeling their restless curves and circles
overhead. But in this I was disappointed for the moment, though only a
little later I was to see them in numbers galore. It was on that last
stretch of my road, when I drove along the dam of the angling ditch.
There they came like a whirlwind and wheeled and curved and circled
about as if they knew no enemy, feeding meanwhile with infallible skill
from the tops of seed-bearing weeds while skim