Now, as soon as the sun arose in the east, which still glowed red as copper molten and cooling, hosts of crows and daws had been coming thence, winging their flight from beyond the lurid clouds. They flew very high; so high that neither the eye could well make them out, nor the ear catch distinctly the wild and melancholy harshness of their croaking, which sounded like weeping in the autumn night. And from the belfry, the tolling sounded continually. The deep notes of that doleful hymn rolled heavily through the thick nebulous air—rolled all over the country-side, and men and fields and villages seemed as one vast heart, throbbing to the dismal dirge. And still the flocks of birds increased, even to the dismay and stupefaction of the people; for now they flew lower, ever in vaster multitudes, sprinkling the sky as with scattered specks of soot; and the dull flapping and croaking was now louder, more boisterous, more turbulent—like a storm that is drawing nigh. They swept in circles over the village: and as a heap of dead leaves the blast plays with, so they wheeled over the ploughed lands, floated down to the woods, hung above the skeleton poplar-trees, took possession of the lindens round about the church, and perched upon the trees in the burial-ground. “A severe winter it will be,” people said. “Snow is going to fall—they are flying towards the woods.” They now approached the huts in still greater numbers; never before had so many been seen together. People looked at them, sighing, in fear of an evil omen, and some made on their brows the sign of the Cross, as a protection from the evil to come, and put on their garments to set out for church. And continually the tolling sounded with a dull roar; from the neighbouring villages the people were already coming to pray. An all-pervading sense of desolation filled every soul; in every heart, there reigned a strange distressful silence: the stillness of mournful reminiscences, the recollections of those who had gone before, gone to lie beneath the drooping birch-trees, and the darkly looming crosses, that stood slantwise in the churchyard. “O my Jesus! O my beloved Jesus!” they would murmur, and then raise up their ashen-grey faces, and fear no longer, plunging into the mystery of futurity: and they calmly went forward to present their offerings and to say their prayers for the dead. The whole village was as though lost in a sea of grave and heart-stricken quietude: only the whining singsong of the _Dziads_ at the church-door now and then broke the stillness. At Boryna’s, the silence was especially deep: though indeed it was of that hell which reigned amongst them, and was on the point of bursting forth. His children knew all by that time.