The Sowers by Henry Seton Merriman — Read

A tearing, howling wind from the north -- from the boundless snow-clad plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow.

The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty degrees below freezing-point. A drift -- constant, restless, never altering -- sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before a steady wind. This white scud -- a flying scud of frozen water -- was singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a cyclone in the China Seas. Any object that broke the wind -- a stunted pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post -- had at its leeward side a high, narrow snowdrift tailing off to the dead level of the plain. Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once. But these objects were few and far between. The deadly monotony of the scene -- the trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of Gobi when the snow lies on it -- all these tell the same grim truth to all who look on them: the old truth that man is but a small thing and his life but as the flower of the grass.