The solemn ceremonies announcing the formal ending of winter had already taken place. In the presence of the Czar, his Court, and his hierarchy, the cannon rending the hard-glittering surface of the Neva had done its work, and, therefore, officially speaking, spring was born to the Muscovite people. But how dour and morose was this infant season that particular year, shivering and cowering in the cold rain! Indeed, it had not as yet unfolded its very faintest green banner, and continued to sulk away the days and the nights, hiding from all the expectant eyes so impatiently awaiting its advent. The Province of Tvernovna was being especially ill-treated, and coarse brutality might justly have been laid at the door of the storm-powers responsible for its evil case. There, rivers that had usually been content with flowing like slightly ruffled mill-ponds when once debarrassed of their winter coatings, now turned themselves into raging torrents, demolishing their banks with, so to speak, a wrathful heaving of the shoulder, and spreading out over the steppe in billowing waves, foam-slavered and yellow, sufficient to carry a house off its feet among the débris of trees and bushes that seemed but a smaller edition of the Sargasso Sea. As a matter of fact the loosed waters had for days been encroaching on the outskirts of the village of Tverna, and already stretched broad tongues and ribbons of wetness toward the base of the slope whereon it nestled below the Castle, until it seemed stranded like a peninsula in a lagoon, and the dark soil floated up by the unpleasing tide spread in an ever-increasing stain over the drowned turf.