e one panic-stricken look as they leaped over the chariot steps,
and then fled to the barn chamber, whence he had to be dragged by his
mother, and cuffed into willingness to attend the spectacle that had
once so dazzled his imagination.

On the eventful afternoon of the performance the road was gay with
teams. David and Samantha Milliken drove by in Miss Cummin's neat
carryall, two children on the back seat, a will-o'-the-wisp baby girl
held down by a serious boy. Steve Webster was driving Doxy Morton in his
mother's buggy. Jabe Slocum, Pitt Packard, Brad Gibson, Cyse Higgins,
and scores of others were riding "shank's mare," as they would have
said.

It had been a close, warm day, and as the afternoon wore away it grew
hotter and closer. There was a dead calm in the air, a threatening
blackness in the west that made the farmers think anxiously of their
hay. Presently the thunderheads ran together into big black clouds,
which melted in turn into molten masses of smoky orange, so that the
heavens were like burnished brass. Drivers whipped up their horses, and
pedestrians hastened their steps. Steve Webster decided not to run even
the smallest risk of injuring so precious a commodity as Doxy Morton by
a shower of rain, so he drove into a friend's yard, put up his horse,
and waited till the storm should pass by. Brad Gibson stooped to drink
at a wayside brook, and as he bent over the water he heard a low,
murmuring, muttering sound that seemed to make the earth tremble.

Then from hill to hill "leapt the live thunder." Even the distant
mountains seemed to have "found a tongue." A zigzag chain of lightning
flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another
peal, louder than the first, and nearer.

The rain began to fall, the forked flashes of flame darted hither and
thither in the clouds, and the boom of heaven's artillery grew heavier
and heavier. The blinding sheets of light and the tumultuous roar
of sound now followed each other so quickly that they seemed almost
simultaneous. Flash--crash--flash--crash--flash--crash; blinding and
deafening eye and ear at once. Everybody who could find a shelter of any
sort hastened to it. The women at home set their children in the midst
of feather beds, and some of them even huddled there themselves, their
babies clinging to them in sympathetic fear, as the livid shafts of
light illuminated the dark rooms with more than noonday glare.

The air was full of gloom; a