And again sleep was master, the voice died away, and Maria gathered
up the reins dropped from her father's hand.

The icy road held alongside the frozen river. The houses on the other
shore, each surrounded with its patch of cleared land, were sadly
distant from one another. Behind the clearings, and on either side of
them to the river's bank, it was always forest: a dark green background
of cypress against which a lonely birch tree stood out here and there,
its bole naked and white as the column of a ruined temple.

On the other side of the road the strip of cleared land was continuous
and broader; the houses, set closer together, seemed an outpost of the
village; but ever behind the bare fields marched the forest, following
like a shadow, a gloomy frieze without end between white ground and gray
sky.

"Charles Eugene, get on there!"

Chapdelaine woke and made his usual good-humoured feint toward the
whip; but by the time the horse slowed down, after a few livelier
paces, he had dropped off again, his hands lying open upon his knees
showing the worn palms of the horse-hide mittens, his chin resting
upon the coat's thick fur.

After a couple of miles the road climbed a steep hill and entered
the unbroken woods. The houses standing at intervals in the flat
country all the way from the village came abruptly to an end, and
there was no longer anything for the eye to rest upon but a
wilderness of bare trunks rising out of the universal whiteness.
Even the incessant dark green of balsam, spruce and gray pine was