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.
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