pted it passively.

"Oh, it's like sleeping on hearse-curtains!" was all she said.

It was already evening, but growing darker with the clouds that went on
piling their purple masses and awaiting their signal. Suddenly the
sweet, soft breeze trembled and veered, there was a brief calm, and the
wind had hauled round the other way. A silence of preparation, answered
by a long, low note of thunder, and the war had begun in heaven.

Miss Emma buried her face in the moss. But Flor, secretly relishing a
good thunder-gust, drew up her knees and sat with equanimity, like a
little black judge of the clouds; for, in the moment's dull, indifferent
mood, she felt prepared for either fate. It was long before the rain
came; then it plunged, a brief downfall, as if a cloud had been ripped
and emptied,--a suffocating terror of rain, teeming with more appalling
intimations than anything else in the world. But the wind was a blind
tornado. The boughs swung over them and swept them; the swamp-water was
lifted, and gluts of it slapped in Flor's face. She saw, not far away, a
great solitary cypress rearing its head, and bearing aloft a broad
eagle's nest, hurriedly seized in the grasp of the gale, twisted,
raised, and snapped like a straw. The child began to shudder strangely
at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black
vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was
nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful
wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space
and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the
heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base
sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world
wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of
fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods
behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some
burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the
lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush
answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and
sought the protection of the blind earth, full of awe and quaking, till
by-and-by the last discharge, muffled and ponderous, rolled away, and,
save for a muttered growl in some far distant den, the world was still
and dark again.

Flor spoke to her mistress, and foun