“I have enough of this. If my heart were of stone, such a blow would break it!... If Antek chooses, let him stay abroad and take his ease in the tavern. But her I do not forgive for the wrong she has done me: I will pay her ... and in full! Yes, even though I rot in prison for it.—If such were to walk God’s earth unpunished, then were there no justice in the world!”... Such were her thoughts. But after a while her fury burnt itself out, and grew as pallid as the flowers seen when the window-panes are frosted over. Her strength was now almost entirely spent, her burden crushed her down; the hard knots on the pine-faggots bruised her shoulders, and her back was aching sorely; while her bundle, fixed with a stick across her neck, pulled hard at her throat, choking her so that she trudged on ever more heavily and slowly. The road was all covered with driven snow, and open to the blasts on every side. The poplars, scarcely visible a few yards away, stood in an interminable row, bowing and bending with fearful cries and shrieks as the wind lashed them; struggling as birds in a snare, that scream and beat their wings in vain convulsive outbursts. On the uplands, the wind had somewhat abated; but down below, its rage was yet greater than before. Down the road it swept, and on either side, and over the plain, and away in the grey blurred distance. The hurricane still raged here, as in a cauldron: a thousand eddying gusts kept up a goblin dance; a thousand spheres of snow, wafted off the plain, rolled along like enormous white whirling spindles; thousands of snow-piles went moving over the ground; thousands of ridges undulated forward, growing larger and larger, higher and higher, as if they would reach the sky and hide all things from sight—and then collapsed on a sudden with a tumultuous uproar. The whole country-side looked like a boiling pan, brimming over with white liquid, bubbling and frothing and foaming and steaming; while, with the night, there came multitudinous voices, rising up from the ground, hissing loud overhead, thunderous afar off: sounds like the swishing and cracking of many whips—forest-music as the organ’s low rumbling drone at the Elevation—wild long howls that rent the air—cries as of birds, wandering and lost—horrible noises as of unearthly weeping and sobbing; and then silence again—and then the keen dry whistling of the wind in the poplars, that tossed to and fro in the turbid snow-charged air, like fearful phantoms, raising their arms to Heaven! And Hanka dragged herself along, almost groping her way from poplar to poplar, often stopping to rest, and listening to those weird voices of the evening.