oose. It was the nearest approach to a
spade that was left him. Just as he got back to the hole another blast
carried him off his feet, and he fell prostrate, this time clutching his
substitute spade beneath him. He rose again, stepped into the hole,
crouching down as low as possible, and rapidly raised out of it one
shovelful of earth after another; it was no sooner on the surface than
it was whisked away like dust. In the wood, a furlong to the right, some
dozen trees were prostrated between one thrust of the shovel and the
next; dark straight firs and silver birches, that slipped downwards to
the valley like stiff, gleaming snakes.

Meanwhile the shovel had struck on a layer of stones, the remains of
some past landslip, since buried under flowering earth. With its
turned-back edge, it was hard to insert it below them, and again and
again it came up having raised nothing but a little gravel; but the old
man worked on still with his docile, child-like look, intent upon his
task. Presently the infirm handle came off, and the shovel dropped into
the bottom of the hole. At the same moment, with a wilder shriek and a
fiercer on-rush, the fury came tearing again along the mountain side;
the whole of the trees that yet remained in the patch of forest nearest
to the cottage were swept away at once, and the slope was left bare. The
old man crouched down in his hole, with his anxious eye fixed on the
four walls within which the baby was sheltered; they still stood, the
only object which the demon had not yet swept from his path. And even as
the old man looked, he saw the upper part of the back wall begin to
loosen, to totter, and give way. The baby was in the front room, but was
under the windward wall. In the teeth of the gale the old man crawled
out of the hole, extended his length on the ground, and began to drag
his stiff and trembling frame, with hands, elbows and knees, across the
fifty feet or so of barren soil that lay between the hole and the
cottage. He heard the crash of bricks before he had accomplished half
the distance; without pausing to look he crawled rapidly on till he
crossed the threshold, and saw the babe still sleeping safely in its
wooden cradle. There were two large iron dogs in the grate; he drew them
out and placed them--panting painfully with the effort, for they were
almost beyond his strength to lift--in the cradle, under the little
mattress, one at each end. The baby, disturbed in its slumber, stret