They howled on in troops, they poured forwards in torrents that nothing could restrain; they rushed along as if coming out of broken fetters, in raging bellowing multitudes, striking at the gloom, dispelling it utterly, swallowing it up or sweeping it away like rotten chaff. And out and far over the fields, in screaming turmoil, was driven the fog as froth before the wind. The clouds, trampled down by the feet of the pitiless storm, fled and rolled off, to skulk in the woodlands and forests. The sky was swept clean; once more, though with dull and sullen mien, the day peered forth, and every creature drew a breath of relief. For nearly the whole of Sunday the gales blew on without any surcease or abatement. In the day-time, they were not yet quite intolerable; but the nights became beyond bearing. These fell, bright and starlit, and it was then that the gales played their most furious pranks. Folks did not say (as they do when the wind is high): “Sure someone has hung himself,” but: “Fivescore men must be hanging now!” What with the howling, the banging, and the creaking as of a thousand empty wagons dashing at a gallop over hard-frozen ice, no one could sleep a wink. The huts creaked likewise. Often and again did the storm come driving at the corners, heaving up the thatches, butting at the doors: sometimes even breaking in the panes so that they had to get up at night and stop them with pillows: for it then rushed in with a sound like the squealing of noisy swine—bringing along with it such fierce cold as benumbed the inmates under their eiderdown quilts. None can say what the villagers suffered, in the course of those days, of those nights. Nor what harm was done abroad. The blasts bore down the fences, plucked off the thatched roofs, and—at the Voyt’s—blew down a shed that was all but new. They tore the roof from Bartek Koziol’s granary, and carried it away more than a furlong’s distance into the fields; they threw down the chimney at the Vincioreks’; they wrenched a good bit of boarding from the mill-roof: and as to the multitudes of minor losses, and the many trees uprooted in the orchards and woods, who can tell them? Why, upon the highway alone, they tore up and cast across the road about a score of poplars, that lay like as many murdered and pitilessly mutilated corpses! The oldest inhabitant could not remember when the winds had been so hostile and done so much injury.