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The Lame Priest
S. Carleton (Susan Carleton Jones)
Atlantic Monthly 88 (Dec. 1901)
If the air had not been December's, I should have said there was balm in it. Balm there was, to me, in the sight of the road before me. The first snow of winter had been falling for an hour or more; the barren hill was white with it. What wind there was was behind me, and I stopped to look my fill.
The long slope stretched up till it met the sky, the softly rounded white of it melting into the gray clouds -- the dove-brown clouds -- that touched the summit, brooding, infinitely gentle. From my feet led the track, sheer white, where old infrequent wheels had marked two channels for the snow to lie; in the middle a clear filmy brown, -- not the shadow of a color, but the light of one; and the gray and white and brown of it all was veiled and strange with the blue- gray mist of falling snow. So quiet, so kind, it fell, I could not move for looking at it, though I was not halfway home.
My eyes are not very good. I could not tell what made that brown light in the middle of the track till I was on it, and saw it was only grass standing above the snow; tall, thin, feathery autumn grass, dry and withered. It was so beautiful I was sorry to walk on it.
I stood looking down at it, and then, because I had to get on, lifted my eyes to the skyline. There was something black there, very big against the low sky; very swift, too, on its feet, for I had scarcely wondered what it was before it had come so close that I saw it was a man, a priest in his black soutane. I never saw any man who moved so fast without running. He was close to me, at my side, passing me even as I thought it.<