Despite her familiarity with every step of the way, Marcella thought herself inconceivably long in reaching the gate, so buffeted she was by the wind, so thong-like was the lashing rain, so turbulent the elemental commotion. A vivid flash of lightning seemed to meet her there, followed so closely by others, hardly less brilliant, that the effect for a few moments was unintermittent, while the simultaneous thunder rolled. The sinister glare revealed the sky with its myriads of lines of rain; the tormented mountains with their groaning, swaying forests; and close at hand the broad cornfield, the stalks tossed and writhen, here and there flinging up their long blades in a gesture that suggested an appreciated agony. And then all was dark again, and her progress along the turn-row was beset with unexpected difficulty, since the stalks, broken and bent across it, furnished continually recurring barriers. She was glad to emerge into the open road at last, and she paused, breathless for a moment. The difficulties of the way had so absorbed her that she was now canvassing for the first time whom she might best rouse. The storm, since she was in its midst, seemed a more valid obstacle than when her grandmother had suggested it. One neighbor she dismissed from consideration as too old to grant so onerous a favor. Another had a wife and child very ill. A third was afflicted with “lung complaint.” As she stood doubtful a certain sound caught her ears in a lull in the wind,—the sound of a hammer and a sledge upon an anvil. How strange, she thought, that Clem Sanders should be at the forge at this hour of the night,—how providential! She had heard none of the rumors subsequent to the parson’s vision, and it was out of her mind for the nonce. She only reflected, as she turned her swift steps thither, that Clem Sanders would gladly ride thrice fourteen miles on an errand for her, indifferent to the fury of any mountain storm. “He be powerful skeered o’ gal-folks, an’ say ‘Yes’m’ an’ ‘Naw’m’ even ter Is’bel, perliter ’n a pig in a poke, an’ he ain’t got no conversation ’mongst gals, but he ain’t ’feard o’ nuthin’ else. I’ll be bound he ain’t ’feard o’ the weather.”