At evening, from time to time, the huge crimson bulk of the setting sun would still peer out of the west, going down ponderously—a globe of molten iron, whence blood-red floods would gush forth, with smoke-like pitch-black vapours rising round them, looking like a grand and gloomy conflagration. They said: “The winter is growing harder, and ill winds will be rising soon.” And indeed the winter did grow harder—every day, every hour, every minute. Directly after the fourth of December (the day of St. Barbara, patroness of a holy death), the first of the winter gales began blowing in short whiffling puffs. They skimmed along the ground, with a baying like that of hounds hot on a trail. They bit into the ploughed fields, snarled about the bushes, worried the snow-drifts, tore at the orchard boughs, swept along the highways, sniffed in the streams; and here and there, with but little ado, they ruined every thatch and fence that was in poor condition. After which they fled, still baying, away to the forest lands; and after them out of the dusk came the great winds on the very same evening, their long sharp tongues lolling out of their wheezy jaws. All night they blew, howling across the fields like packs of famished wolves. They did their work well, too. Ere morning the stark hardened earth had been quite stripped of its tattered and scattered covering of snow; only in places, in hollows and ditches, could a few white rags be seen on the fences. The fields too had some shiny white spots left; but the roads lay frozen deep—as it were, petrified—and the frost had bitten profoundly into the soil with its keen fangs, so that it resounded with a metallic ring like iron. But with the morning, the gales fled to hide in the woods, where they lurked, tremulous and shuddering.