 does not prompt to enterprise.
    The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river, behind
which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land, partly meadow and
partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a wide undulating upland.
    The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than
amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible;
the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar
than such well-known ones as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf.
Many are not so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering
the general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to the country
hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might have been successively
observed the retreat of the snakes, the transformation of the ferns, the filling
of the pools, a rising of fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the
fungi, and an obliteration by snow.
    This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid moor,
and for the first time in the season its irregularities were forms without
features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more
character than that of being the limit of something else - the lowest layer of a
firmament of snow. From this chaotic skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor
momentarily received additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked
thereby. The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were
the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor; for the
instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and that encrusting the
earth would soon unite into one mass without any intervening stratum of air at
all.
    We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness
in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and
darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be
darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if anything could be gloomier than the
wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the façade was notched
and pronged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified
the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the
water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.
    An indescribable succession of dull blows, perplexing in their regularity,
sent their sound with difficulty through the fluffy atmosphere
