er at
harvest time. Despite our shrewdest inspection of the weather signs, the
wheat as well as the other grain would often get wet in the field, and
sometimes it would lie wet so long as to sprout. Sprouted wheat flour
makes a kind of bread which drives the housewife to despair.

"Oh, this dog-days weather!" the Old Squire would exclaim, as the grain
lay wet in the field, day after day, or when an August shower came
rumbling over the mountains just as we were raking it up into windrows
and tumbles.

I had never heard of "dog days" before and was curious to know what sort
of days they were. "They set in," the Old Squire informed me, "on the
twenty-fifth of July and last till the fifth of September. Then is when
the Dog-star rages, and it is apt to be 'catching' weather. Dogs are
more liable to run mad at this time of year, and snakes are most
venomous then." Such is the olden lore, and I gained an impression that
those forty-two days were after a manner unhealthy for man and beast.

Near the middle of August that summer there came the most terrific
thunder shower which I had ever witnessed. Halse, Addison and Asa Doane
had mowed the acre of barley that morning, and after dinner we three
boys went out into the field to turn the swaths, for the sun had been
very hot all day. It was while thus employed that we saw the shower
rising over the mountains to the westward and soon heard the thunder. It
rose rapidly, and the clouds took on, as they rolled upward, a peculiar
black, greenish tint.

It was such a tempest as Lucretius describes when he says,--

"So dire and terrible is the aspect of Heaven, that one might think all
the Darkness had left Acheron, to be poured out across the sky, as the
drear gloom of the storm collects and the Tempest, forging loud
thunderbolts, bends down its black face of terror over the affrighted
earth."

Gramp called us in, to carry a few cocks of late-made hay into the barn
from the orchard, and then bade us shut all the barn doors and make
things snug. "For there's a tremendous shower coming, boys," he said.
"There's hail in those clouds."

We ran to do as he advised, and had no more than taken these
precautions when the shower struck. Such awful thunder and such bright,
vengeful lightning had, the people of the vicinity declared, never been
observed in that town, previously. A bolt came down one of the large
Balm o' Gilead trees near the house, and the thunder peal was absolutely
deaf