he southern wood, and a road ran just as directly
outward to the black woodland on the north. This broad and snowy road,
cut by deep wheel ruts, trampled by many heavy footprints, was really
all one road, but the blacksmith's shop, which stood midway between the
two woodlands, and between the two parts of the road, seemed to cut it
into two separate parts. The two colors, white and black, of which this
landscape was composed, struck the eye powerfully, almost oppressively.
All day long no other tone was to be seen but these two, but they
filled so wide a space and were so very strongly marked, that they
seemed to weigh down the picture and changed the loveliness, which it
perhaps might have in summer, to mournful gloom. There stood the two
black pine woods, like the frame of the picture, between heaven and
earth. The sky was white with clouds and the earth with snow. Both the
snow and the clouds were so white, that each reflected upon the other a
painfully livid brightness. The road was white, but sharply cut by the
shadows that lay in the wheel tracks and footprints. The blacksmith
shop also was black and white. The shingled roof, from which the wind
had swept the snow, was black, while the whitewashed walls beneath it
were dirty white. Through the wide open doorway the interior of the
smithy could be seen, like a cavern, and the smoke streaming out had
made a sooty streak from the door to the eaves.

The gloomy landscape lay quiet; for it was Sunday and the road was but
little traveled. The smithy also was quiet. Only the door of the
workshop stood open as on a working day: Stephen, the smith, never
closed it all the year round. Neither was there any sign of life inside
the house; and yet there were three people sitting in the living room,
and a fourth, Katharine, the maid, had just left the room and gone into
the kitchen. At the long, deal table, dark with age, sat the three,
Stephen, the smith, Maria, his wife, and the blond Ludwig, his brother.
In the dark room reigned the same gloomy desolation that lay over the
surrounding landscape. If one stepped from outside into the bare living
room, the strange similarity of the one with the other, would strike
one like a blow in the face. There were the bare, sooty, whitewashed
walls, the grimy floor, a black stove, clumsy, dark colored chairs, a
rough table, a chest of drawers to match, with a soiled crocheted cover
on it. There sat these people, with three tin plates and a