It has been decades, centuries nearly, since the road was a quiet road across the hill, white in the starlight.  Yet tonight, walking back home along the widened, paved highway where the average speed is somewhere near 60, there was the briefest sense of that silent pale ribbon that wound down the hill.  It was cold, the cold of early fall when it is summer still, when the crickets are still singing and the bats are fast-flying hunters above the fields. There was a lull in the traffic just then and only one car passed. I wondered what they thought of the woman in the long, dark skirt, her hair up in an old style, walking down the road in the night.  Nothing at all I am sure, if even they saw me.

If ghosts walk, it is not in the cemeteries, but on the long roads that no man walks today, where ten thousand travelers pass and not one knows the way itself.