Their connection with her, short as it had been, was
over for ever.
Joseph then placed the flowers as enjoined, and the
evergreens around the flowers, till it was difficult to
divine what the waggon contained; he smacked his
whip, and the rather pleasing funeral car crept down
the hill, and along the road to Weatherbury.
The afternoon drew on apace, and, looking to the
right towards the sea as he walked beside the horse, Poor-
grass saw strange clouds and scrolls of mist rolling over
the long ridges which girt the landscape in that quarter.
They came in yet greater volumes, and indolently crept
across the intervening valleys, and around the withered
papery flags of the moor and river brinks. Then their
dank spongy forms closed in upon the sky. It was
a sudden overgrowth of atmospheric fungi which had
their roots in the neighbouring sea, and by the time
that horse, man, and corpse entered Yalbury Great
Wood, these silent workings of an invisible hand had
reached them, and they were completely enveloped,
this being the first arrival of the autumn fogs, and the
first fog of the series.
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