To this better estimate of them, Roger was, no doubt, partly led by his friendship for Job Forster. Job, indeed, through the whole of these six months, so calm and full of hope to us at Netherby, continued to forebode storms. "The weather was brewed," he said, "on the hills and by the sea; and folks who were bred on the flats, out of sight of sea and hills, and who only knew one-half of the world, could not reasonably be expected to understand the signs of the sky. The Lord, in his belief, had plenty of work to do on his anvil yet, before the swords were beaten into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks. It was more likely the ploughshares would have to be beaten into swords, and priming-hooks into spears." And the village coulters, spades, and mattocks, received from Job's hammer treatment all the more vigorous on account of the warlike figures they supplied. Moreover, Rachel, his wife, looking out from her chamber-window one stormy night across the Fens, had seen wonders in the heavens, black-plumed clouds, marshalled like armies, rolling far away to the east, till the rising sun smote them to a blood-red; while high above, from behind these, one white-winged arm, as of an archangel swept across the sky untouched by the red glow of battle, raised majestically, as if to warn or to smite. "There is something terrible going on somewhere," she had said, "or else something terrible to come." And Job, to whom Rachel's words had always a tender sacredness in them, woven of the old reverence of our northern race for the prophet-woman; of sacred memories of the inspired songs of Deborah and Hannah, interpreted by his belief that the people of the Bible were not exceptional but typical; and of his own strong love for her--believed Rachel's visions with entire unconsciousness how much they were reflections of his own convictions. "How," he would say, "could a feeble creature like her, nurtured and cherished like a babe, and busy all her life in naught but enduring sicknesses or doing kindnesses, know aught of wars and battlefields, unless it was of the Lord?" So Job foreboded, and we hoped, and the summer months passed on.