and they were all cut off unprepared.

When, followed by a few stragglers, these had passed and gathered
themselves in the red shadow beneath the gateway towers waiting for the
summons, an unusual thing occurred. For a few moments the Road was left
quite empty. After that last great stroke Death seemed to be resting on
his laurels. When thus unpeopled it looked a very vast place like to a
huge arched causeway, bordered on either side by blackness, but itself
gleaming with a curious phosphorescence such as once or twice I have
seen in the waters of a summer sea at night.

Presently in the very centre of this illuminated desolation, whilst it
was as yet far away, something caught my eye, something so strange to
the place, so utterly unfamiliar that I watched it earnestly, wondering
what it might be. Nearer and nearer it came, with curious, uncertain
hops; yes, a little brown object that hopped.

"Well," I said to myself, "if I were not where I am I should say that
yonder thing was a hare. Only what would a hare be doing on the Great
White Road? How could a hare tread the pathway of eternal souls? I must
be mistaken."

So I reflected whilst still the thing hopped on, until I became certain
that either I suffered from delusions, or that it was a hare; indeed a
particularly fine hare, much such a one as a friend of my old landlady,
Mrs. Smithers, had once sent her as a Christmas present from Norfolk,
which hare I ate.

A few more hops brought it opposite to my post of observation. Here it
halted as though it seemed to see me. At any rate it sat up in the alert