tion.

* * * * *

July, which began fresh and cool, burned, that year, into a scorching
heat, until the torrid skies bent in a blue arch of arid cruelty and the
ridges stood starkly stripped of their moisture.

Forests were rusted and freckled and roads gave off a choke of dust to
catch the breath of travellers as the heat waves trembled feverishly
across the clear, hot distances.

Like a barometer of that scorched torpor, before the eyes of the slowly
convalescing Thornton stood the walnut tree in the dooryard. A little
while ago it had spread its fresh and youthful canopy of green overhead
in unstinted abundance of vigour.

Now it stood desolate, with its leaves drooping in fever-hot inertia.
The squirrel sat gloomily silent on the branches, panting under its fur,
and the oriole's splendour of orange and jet had turned dusty and
bedraggled.

When a dispirited wisp of breeze stirred in its head-growth its branches
gave out only the flat hoarseness of rattling leaves.

One morning before full daylight old Caleb left the house to cross the
low creek bed valley and join a working party in a new field which was
being cleared of timber. He had been away two hours when without warning
the hot air became insufferably close and the light ghost of breeze died
to a breathless stillness. The drought had lasted almost four weeks, and
now at last, though the skies were still clear, that heat-vacuum seemed
to augur its breaking.

An hour later over the ridge came a black and lowering pall of cloud
moving slowly and bellying out from its inky centre with huge masses of
dirty fleece at its margin--and in the little time that Dorothy stood in
the door watching, it spread until the high sun was obscured.

The distant but incessant rumbling of thunder was a chorussed growling
of storm voices against a background of muffled drum-beat, and the girl
said, a shade anxiously, "Gran'pap's goin' ter git drenched ter ther
skin."

While the inky pall spread and lowered until it held the visible world
in a gray-green corrosion of gloom the stillness became more pulseless.
Then with a crashing salvo of suddenness the tempest broke--and it was
as though all the belated storms of the summer had merged into one
armageddon of the elements.

A rending and splintering of timber sounded with the shriek of the
tornado that whipped its lash of destruction through the woods. The
girl, buffeted and almost swept fro