Thus did Yagna, bound, on a bed of dung, the blood oozing from her beaten limbs, disgraced for all her life, unutterably degraded, and supreme in wretchedness, lie neither hearing nor feeling anything around her; but the tears streamed down her bruised cheeks. At times, too, her bosom rose as if to utter a cry—but the cry never came. It stopped within her, petrified. “Faster, Pete, faster!” they exclaimed, hurrying him along, and impatience partly calming their madness, they now came on at a quick trot, nearing the mounds which were the landmarks of Lipka. Here they pulled out one side of the cart, made of loose boards, and shot her out, along with the dung, like loathsome offal. A loud thud was heard; she fell on her back, and remained motionless. The Voytova came forward, and spurned at her with her foot, hissing: “Return to us again, and we’ll hunt you away with dogs!” and, lifting up a clod as hard as a stone, and striking her cruelly, she added: “This for the wrong you have done my children!” Another struck her a second blow: “This for the shame you have brought on Lipka!” “May you perish for ever and evermore!” “May you never lie in hallowed earth!” “But die of hunger and of thirst!” With these invectives, there rained upon her clods and stones and handfuls of earth; while she lay motionless, looking up into the trees that waved over her. Then it grew dark, and a dense rain began to fall. Pete delayed over “something to arrange about the cart,” so the people did not wait for him, but returned in bands, much depressed and subdued. About half-way back, they met Dominikova, covered with blood and with torn clothes, sobbing and groping her way with a stick. On finding out whom she was passing, she shrieked in a fearful voice: “Murrain and plague and fire and flood—let them not pass you over!” At the words, they hung their heads, and fled panic-stricken. * * * * * It was a great storm. The sky had grown liver-coloured, the dust flew in bellying clouds; the poplars, with sobbing soughing sounds, were bowed and shaken to their roots; the winds howled, wrestling with the corn, and rushed roaring away to the quivering and murmuring forests. Twisted masses of hail-cloud, slate and copper-hued, hung low in bulging piles and airy hummocks here and there, cloven by streaming thunderbolts of wonderful brightness; though indeed the hail fell only in scanty showers, beating down a few leaves and boughs. This, with few intervals, lasted all day long and till evening set in, followed by a black, cool, refreshing night. And the next day it was splendid weather again; a sky without a stain, and the land sparkling all over with dew. Everything in Lipka was now on its former footing. As soon as the sun was well above the sky-line, they all, as by common consent, sallied forth together to reap; the field pathways and roads were alive with rolling carts.