nameless terror lurked within it; the
elements seemed at war with each other. Horses whinnied in the stables,
and colts dashed about the pastures. The cattle sought sheltered places;
the cows ambling clumsily towards some refuge, their full bags dripping
milk as they swung heavily to and fro. The birds flew towards the
orchards and the deep woods; the swallows swooped restlessly round the
barns, and hid themselves under the eaves or in the shadow of deserted
nests.

The rain now fell in sheets.

"Hurry up 'n' git under cover, Jabe," said Brad Gibson; "you're jest the
kind of a pole to draw lightnin'!"

"You hain't, then!" retorted Jabe. "There ain't enough o' you fer
lightnin' to ketch holt of!"

Suddenly a ghastly streak of light leaped out of a cloud, and then
another, till the sky seemed lit up by cataracts of flame. A breath of
wind sprang into the still air. Then a deafening crash, clap, crack,
roar, peal! and as Jabe Slocum looked out of a protecting shed door,
he saw a fiery ball burst from the clouds, shooting brazen arrows as it
fell. Within the instant the meeting-house steeple broke into a tongue
of flame, and then, looking towards home, he fancied that the fireball
dropped to earth in Squire Bean's meadow.

The wind blew more fiercely now. There was a sudden crackling of wood,
falling of old timers, and breaking of glass. The deadly fluid ran in a
winding course down a great maple by the shed, leaving a narrow charred
channel through the bark to tell how it passed to earth. A sombre pine
stood up, black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound in
the split trunk.

The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint rumbling of
thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea; the clouds broke
away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see what had been going
on in the world since he hid himself an hour before. A delicate rainbow
bridge stretched from the blackened church steeple to the glittering
weathercock on the squire's barn; and there, in the centre of the fair
green meadows from which it had risen in glorious strength and beauty
for a century or more, lay the nooning tree.

The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck in the very
centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way from feather tip to
sturdy root, riving the tree in twain, cleaving its great boughs left
and right, laying one majestic half level with the earth, and bending
the other till