up yer cover, yer mean cranberry-thief!"

The spiteful terrier, which had meanwhile evinced an unpleasant interest
in the thickness of my pantaloons, added his yelping to the clamor, and
Mr. B., pointing to the clouds, thought we had better hasten homewards.
So we bade farewell to Hannah and her nephew, as I learned that the
unfortunate vessel of her wrath in reality was, and dived into the
gloomy recesses of the Pines again.

Long ere we got back to Cranberry Lodge, all doubts of an impending
tempest had disappeared. The eastern sky, cloudless an hour before,
was now overhung with a livid bank of ash-gray clouds, which were
incessantly riven by broad and terrible flashes of silent lightning. A
slight westerly breeze was blowing, and evidently impeded the progress
of the storm, which was beating up from seaward against the wind.
Plunging through prickly thickets and dashing through the turbid brooks,
we hastened toward the clearing, committed Cranberry Lodge to the
custody of the "hired man," and untied our horses from the saplings to
which they were made fast. In another moment we were on the back trail.
Scarcely, however, was the clearing shut out of view when a little
hesitating puff of wind from the east blew chill upon us; the breeze had
veered, and the tempest was at hand. In the twinkling of an eye, the
western horizon was overhung with the same ghastly storm-bank that
threatened in the east, while a monitory gust rustled through the
sighing pines, wildly twisting and tossing the undergrowth,--overspread
with a quivering pallor as it bent before the breeze,--and bade us be
prepared. Next moment, a clap of thunder, rattling like the artillery of
ten thousand sieges, or like millions of bars of iron dashed furiously
together, broke upon the forest. It was the most awful sound, terrible
even in its expected suddenness, that I ever heard. Simultaneously a
flash of purple lightning fell from the zenith to the horizon, splitting
the clouds asunder, and with it there descended rain in a cataract
rather than in torrents, so that in the twinkling of an eye the thirsty
sand was saturated, and bubbling pools of water pattered in the deluged
path. Crash after crash, each clap more terrific than the one preceding,
came the awful thunder; blinding flashes of lightning darted around
us;--but still our phlegmatic ponies galloped on, and only once started
violently, when a peal which really seemed as if its shock must burst
the