The cliffs
of black poplar boles engulfed me at once: a sheltered
grade.
But I had not yet gone very far--a mile perhaps, or a
little over--when the trees began to bend under the impact
of that squall. Nearly at the same moment the sun, which
so far had been shining in an intermittent way, was
blotted from the sky, and it turned almost dusky. For a
long while--for more than an hour, indeed--it had seemed
as if that black squall-cloud were lying motionless at
the horizon--an anchored ship, bulging at its wharf. But
then, as if its moorings had been cast off, or its sails
unfurled, it travelled up with amazing speed. The wind
had an easterly slant to it--a rare thing with us for a
wind from that quarter to bring a heavy storm. The gale
had hardly been blowing for ten or fifteen minutes, when
the snow began to whirl down. It came in the tiniest
possible flakes, consisting this time of short needles
that looked like miniature spindles, strung with the
smallest imaginable globules of ice--no six-armed crystals
that I could find so far. Many a snowstorm begins that
way with us. And there was even here, in the chasm of
the road, a swing and dance to the flakes that bespoke
the force of the wind above.
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