ssy.

R. NISBET BAIN.

_October_, 1900.

THE DAY OF WRATH.

CHAPTER I.

THE BIRD OF ILL-OMEN.

Whoever has traversed the long single street of Hetfalu will have
noticed three houses whose exterior plainly shows that nobody dwells in
them.

The first of these three houses is outside the village on a great green
hill, round which the herds of the village peacefully crop the pasture.
Only now and then does one or other of these quiet beasts start back
when it suddenly comes upon a white skeleton, or a bleached
bullock-horn, in the thickest patches of the high grass. The house
itself has no roof, and the soot with which years of heavy rains have
bedaubed the walls, points to the fact that once upon a time the place
was burnt out. Now, dry white stalks of straw wave upon the mouldering
balustrades.

The iron supports have been taken out of the windows, on the threshold
thorns and thistles grow luxuriantly. There is no trace of a
path--perhaps there never was one.

The land surrounding this house is full of all sorts of fragrant
flowers.

The second house stands in the centre of the village, and was the castle
of the lord of the manor. It is a dismal wilderness of a place. A stone
wall, long since fallen to pieces, separated it at one time from the
road. Now only a few fragments of this wall still stand upright, and the
wild jasmine creeps all over it, casting down into the road its
poisonous dark red cherries. The door lolls against its pillars, it
looks as if it had once upon a time been torn from its hinges and then
left to take care of itself. The house itself, indeed, is intact, only
the windows have been taken out and the empty spaces bricked in. Every
door, too, has been walled up, boards have been nailed over the
ventilators in the floor, the white stone staircase leading up to the
hall has been broken off and propped up against the wall, and the same
fate has befallen a red marble bench on the ground floor.

Here and there the cement has fallen away from the front of the house,
and layers of red bricks peep through the gap. In other places large
heaps of white stone are piled up in front of the building. In the rear
of it, which used to look out upon a garden, it is plain that a good
many of the windows have also been built in, and, to obliterate all
trace of them, the whole wall has been whitewashed. All round about many
fruit-trees seem to have been rooted up, and for three years running,
t