Outside, it was slowly getting hotter and hotter still: men could hardly do anything in the fields by day; nor was the night anything but a stifling time spent in a vast oven: even out of doors and in the orchards, it was so. The drought was swiftly becoming a disaster. The cattle came back to their sheds, lowing and hungry from the pasture-lands. Potatoes were withering to the size of hazel-nuts; there were fields wherein the stunted oats rose but a few inches above the ground; the blades of barley were sere; and the rye, untimely dried up, was white with grainless ears. In deep trouble, therefore, they would look, each sunset, in desolate hope, for some indication of a coming change in the weather. But not a cloud hung in the sky. Above them there was only a glassy whitish glare; and the sun would go down unveiled by the faintest shadow of vapour. Many a one new wept fervently at the altar of our Lord’s Transfiguration, before the holy images; but unavailingly. The fields grew ever more parched, more scorched; the fruits fell unripe from the trees; and so little water now went down the stream that both flour-mill and sawmill stood closed, silent and dreary: while the people, reduced to desperation, united, each man paying his quota for a grand votive Mass, with exposition of the Holy Sacrament! So heartily and so fervently did they put up their prayers that not even a heart of stone could have remained untouched. And indeed our Lord did have mercy on them. True, the next day was so sultry, so perspiring, so fiercely glowing that birds fell fainting to the earth, oxen lowed plaintively over the pasture-lands, horses would not come out from their stables, and men, wearied and worn, crawled about the dried-up orchards, unwilling to quit the shade. But it came to pass that—at the very point of noon, when everything seemed about to breathe its last in that white-hot fiery furnace—there came a sudden mist, troubling the brightness of the sun and obscuring it, as if a handful of ashes had been flung over its disk; and shortly there was heard a sound as of the wings of many birds high in air, and livid masses of clouds assembled from every quarter, more louring and more full of grim menace every instant. Now fear breathed in every bosom; and all were still and hushed, though thrilled with apprehension. Many thunders muttered with far-away voices; and then arose a gale, and the dust got up in multitudinous whorls, close and compact; the sun shed a sickly glare, of a sandy yellow hue. And then all rapidly grew dark, and the heavens were filled with swarms of lightnings—as if someone were cracking fiery whip-lashes in the sky. And with the falling of the first thunderbolt the people came rushing out of their houses.