This road does not wend, it is straight as a cord taut between posts. It is a furrow through miles of greensward where homes have been sown, and some sprouted up into villages, and some withered into lorn ruins.
All the details of its ruts, stones and puddles, its population of cottages and their barns, their intricacies of wood-carved eaves and shutters and fences, are equalized by the new snow. The character of a weather vane, once daedal in the spring, now lumpen and indistinct from a midden. A gutter, now a lane. A trough, now a tumulus. Every thing anonymous. Gloved by nude winter.
Where are your people? Their traceless absence is an epitaph: All that our hands have wrought, once in defiance of nature, nature has now taken back; the colors that distinguished us, extinguished in white; then by the final color of the setting sun.
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