further incident we reached the point where the useless,
supernumerary fence post had caught my eye on my first trip out. I had
made nearly eight miles now.

But right here I was to get my first inkling of sights that might
shatter my nerve. You may remember that a grove of tall poplars ran to
the east, skirted along its southern edge by a road and a long line of
telephone posts. Now here, in this shelter of the poplars, the snow from
the more or less level and unsheltered spaces to the northwest had piled
in indeed. It sloped up to the east; and never shall I forget what I
beheld.

The first of the posts stood a foot in snow; at the second one the drift
reached six or seven feet up; the next one looked only half as long
as the first one, and you might have imagined, standing as it did on a
sloping hillside, that it had intentionally been made so much shorter
than the others; but at the bottom of the visible part the wind, in
sweeping around the pole, had scooped out a funnel-shaped crater which
seemed to open into the very earth like a sinkhole. The next pole stood
like a giant buried up to his chest and looked singularly helpless and
footbound; and the last one I saw showed just its crossbar with three
glassy, green insulators above the mountain of snow. The whole surface
of this gigantic drift showed again that "exfoliated" appearance which I
have described. Strange to say, this very exfoliation gave it
something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so
millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with
particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the
sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had
challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort and
the most fearless heart.

So the hostler had not been fibbing after all!

But not for a moment did I think of turning back. I am fatalistic in
temperament. What is to be, is to be, that is not my outlook. If at last
we should get bound up in a drift, well and good, I should then see what
the next move would have to be. While the wind blows, snow drifts; while
my horses could walk and I was not disabled, my road led north, not
south. Like the snow I obeyed the laws of my nature. So far the road was
good, and we swung along.

Somewhere around here a field presented a curious view Its crop had not
been harvested; it still stood in stooks. But from my side I saw nothing
of t