These clouds were charged with snow; as they hung there they seemed to radiate from their depths an even more piercing coldness.
They hung above Olva like a vast mountain range and had in their outline so sharp and real an existence that they were part of the hard black horizon, rising, immediately, out of the long, low, shivering flats.
There was no sound in all the world; behind him, sharply, the Cambridge towers bit the sky--before him like a clenched hand was the little wood.
The silence seemed to have a rhythm and voice of its own so that if one listened, quite clearly the tramp of a marching army came over the level ground.

Always an army marching--and when suddenly a bird rose from the canal with a sharp cry the tramping was caught, with the bird, for an instant, into the air, and then when the cry was ended sank down again.
The wood enlarged; it lay upon the cold land now like a man's head; a man with a cap.

Spaces between the trees were eyes and it seemed that he was lying behind the rim of the world and leaning his head upon the edge of it and gazing.

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