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Fourth-Fifth Academic Prize Essay
The sky was palest crimson streaked with purple, and thin, fluted clouds hung suspended in mid-air like permanent golden banners.
Rising breathlessly up to part this perfection were three white-breasted hills, spotless in pale gleaming petticoats which were trimmed at the bottom with broad, irregular bands of pine trees. All was hushed and chill except for the faint whispering of the pines as the wind started up and the swishing sigh as it slowly died in a wrinkle
of snow.
Clustered closely at the feet of these waxen fortresses in the hollow cupped palm of the earth, a small village spread neatly out like an outstretched fan. Smoke curled up in pale threads from every one of its seventy-eight chimneys, and narrow cobblestone streets wound crookedly through rows of squatty clapboard houses.
Before one of the stoops of a little low slung cottage was an aged man sitting in an ancient rocker and drawing on an age-old seasoned pipe. An air of con tentment and habit surrounded him as if for three hundred and sixty-five days out of every one of his eighty-six years he had sat deep back in his chair and had his evening smoke, musing now and then on the weather or nodding to some homeward bound villager. The ageless wind with strong fingers playfully parted the old man's
beard as a gentle, even tender, gesture at seeing the calm old bard still unchanged. The man was a character, a last brown, toughened leaf of a staunch, sturdy race that typified everything peaceful, calm, and unchanging. Brown heavy folds of skin covered his face and hands, and his eyes were Viking blue with still a bit of that strong, proud will lurking behind to command the awe and respect of the little tots who stared beneath the shaggy, white shades to fathom what strangeness lay within.
The dusk had deepened to darkness so subtly that one imagined the old man had dyed the wind with the dun smoke of his magic pipe. The pine trees were gossiping even louder now, and the hills seemed to rise and fall as if some frozen maiden were sleeping there. The night was a polished urn of flawless ebony, deep and oval, filled with many mystic potents and kept from the scientific, probing eye
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