altered according to the colour of what adjoined it.

Only as regarded the soul of the intelligent Ossip was I
absolutely at a loss, absolutely unable to reach a conclusion.

Pondering these and similar matters in my mind, I, on the day of
which I speak, stood gazing at the river, and at the town under
the hill, as I listened to the bells. Rearing themselves aloft
like the organ pipes in my favourite Polish-Roman Catholic
church, the steeples of the town had their crosses dimly
sparkling as though the latter had been stars imprisoned in a
murky sky. Yet it was as though those stars hoped eventually to
ascend into the purer firmament above the wind-torn clouds that
they sparkled; and as I stood watching the clouds glide onward,
and momentarily efface with their shadows, the town's
multifarious hues, I marked the fact that although, whenever
dark-blue cavities in their substance permitted the beams of the
sun to illuminate the buildings below, those buildings' roofs
assumed tints of increased cheerfulness. The clouds seemed to
glide the faster to veil the beams, while the humid shadows grew
more opaque-- and the scene darkened as though only for a moment
had it assumed a semblance of joy.

The buildings of the town (looking like heaps of muddy snow),
the black, naked earth around those buildings, the trees in the
gardens, the hummocks of piled-up soil, the dull grey glimmer of
the window panes of the houses--all these things reminded me of
winter, even though the misty breath of the northern spring was
beginning to steal over the whole.