The day proved of variable mood. The mists clung sullenly to slope and ravine for a time; the clouds hung low, full of menace; even a muttering of thunder afar off now and again stirred their dense gray masses. The veiled mountains were withdrawn into invisibility. Below, the earth lay as if it consisted only of dull levels, limited, silent, comatose, for the dank, drowsy influence pervaded all energies alike of the animate and the inanimate; there was no sound of beast or bird, no stir of wind or rustle of leaf, and a lethargy dulled pulse and muscle and brain. The sunburst came with the effect of revelation. A vague tremor pervaded the tissues of the gray mists, and all at once a great white glory was on the green mountain sides. The vast spaces to the blue zenith were filled with radiant flying fleecy forms as the transfigured vapor took wing. Far in the south the gray cloudage still held its consistency, and trembled with thunder and sudden elusive palpitating veins of yellow lightning. But the lithe arc of a rainbow presently sprang athwart it, and the wind came gayly piping down the gorge. In the actual perceptible jubilance of the earth, it might seem that the miracles of the goodness and the gladness of the sun were no common thing. There was a visible joy among the leaves as they fluttered together, and lifted up their dank fibres, and lustrously reflected the pervasive sheen, and tremulously murmured and chanted in elfin wise beneath the breath. How was it that the plaining river should suddenly find its melodies again as if light and song were interdependent? A tumultuous, rollicking stave it flung upon the air; and so, faster to the valley! The benignant revivification was on the very flocks; the dull, submissive sheep, huddled drowsily together in the gray menace of the morning, were astir once more, and dispersed here and there as they browsed. Even Luther was singing in the barn as he mended his ploughgear. All day the swift upward flights of the sheeny white figures continued at intervals, and when Adelicia set forth to drive the cows home, in the afternoon, only the more radiant aspects of the world gave token of the storm of the night. She hardly left the print of her shoe in the wild woodland ways through which she wandered, so had the warmth and the light dried the dank herbage. She was out betimes. There was something in the long, meditative strolls that harmonized with certain moods, and Cap'n Lucy sometimes sourly commented, "Ad'licia gone ter fotch home the cows? Waal, who be a-goin' ter fotch home Ad'licia?"