Sixty years then have passed since that day of his sudden, puzzling, even awful inheritance and legacy; yet Advent Sunday has always been so inextricably associated with Windswept that it seems fitting, perhaps even inevitable, that its story should be undertaken on this special November Sunday. Today the snow is deep there and, according to this morning’s weather report, the cold intense and bitter. Today the blueberry fields are discernible only as white mounds tumbling steadily downward toward the wooded point three miles eastward from the house; the tips of the alders, leafless and stiff, shudder in the wind; the clumps of dark, ungainly firs and spruces at each corner of the house and on the slope behind the barn, stand black against the snow, their shadows purple in the sunlight. Today the sea is a purplish gray; surf foams like thick suds about the treeless islands; the distant summit of Cadillac cuts the western sky, sharp and keen as a new knife blade; the spruces of Schoodic are jet-black above the tossing water; and southward the open ocean is ridged with white at the breaking of the swells, uninhabited now, as it is so often even in summer, by a solitary sail.

It is safe to assume that there is no sound there this morning except those of the wind and water. There is surely no human sound. The caretaker does his needless inspecting on Saturdays from the village eight miles away. If there are hunters about, they are miles eastward in the woods and marshes. The snow has discouraged any birds that there might be. The gulls have gone into the bays where there is chance of food. The curlews have long since gone now that the blueberries are gathered. Crows do not often cry above so treeless a piece of land as Windswept.

But the sea thunders against the high, gaunt boulders and pounds the shingle below the headland, pulling back the smaller stones with a roar, hurling them forward again, forever rounding and polishing them. It reverberates in the fissures and openings among the rocks with a roll of drumbeats throbbing for miles as the surging tide madly inundates each hollow and crevice of the massive, uneven coastline. And as for the wind, there is no stopping it either in sound or in volume. It blusters across the snow, sweeping out of sight with the smallest fraction of its breath the button-holing of the rabbits, the feather-stitching of the mice. It booms against the face of the headland, bangs against the closed shutters of the house, distorts the black branches of the trees. It is not in the air. It is the air. It is air swollen to great bulk, heavy with pressure and power, might and force.

Yet there are still days at Windswept, rare summer and autumn days when the sea at dawn is the colour of thin milk and motionless except for the breaking of the long swells in frail white lace about the rocks, days when the sun is pale yellow and one can stare at it without the least sense of being blinded, when a haze fills the air and sails hang languid above the water. It was, in fact, on such a day that John Marston at fourteen came into his inheritance.

There had been a long succession of such days in late November in the year 1880. For such early and heavy snow as this which has just fallen is unusual even to New England, even to the far eastern coast of Maine. November often grants its benison of Indian Summer, nowhere more lovely than at Windswept. The reds and purples of the blueberry leaves hardly fade completely before the heavier frosts begin, so that the whole great extent of rough, uncultivated land from the house itself to the end of Sieur de Monts Point is sometimes almost as swept with colour in November as in October. ”