here, the banks are lined with fantastic ice—columns like organ pipes, bulbs straight from the glassblowers, thin sheets through which one can watch the rising bubbles. Indeed, I have become a connoisseur of ice these days: the sleet that falls like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand. Ah, the whimsy of a God who would deliver water to the earth in the guise of such fine powder! On certain misty days, the clouds leave coats of ragged rime upon the leaves and every single bobbing
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