After a few inches have
fallen the roads are usually blocked, for all the flakes on miles of
hills are swept along and deposited into hollows where the highways run.
To be dug out now and then in the winter is a contingency the mail-driver
reckons as part of his daily life, and the waggons going to and fro
frequently pass between high walls of frozen snow. In these wild places,
which can scarcely be said to be populated at all, a snow-storm, however,
does not block the King's highways and paralyse traffic as London permits
itself to be paralysed under similar circumstances. Men are set to work
and cut a way through in a very short time, and no one makes the least
difficulty about it. But with the tracks that lead to isolated farmsteads
it is different; there is not enough traffic to require the removal of
the obstruction, and the drifts occasionally accumulate to twenty feet
deep. The ladies are imprisoned, and must be thankful if they have got
down a box of new novels.
The dread snow-tempest of 1880-81 swept over these places with tremendous
fury, and the most experienced shepherds, whose whole lives had been
spent going to and fro on the downs, frequently lost their way. There is
a story of a waggoner and his lad going slowly along the road after the
thaw, and noticing an odd-looking scarecrow in a field.
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