Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/209

 'If it would only rain, said the boy listening.

'It will not rain,' said Musa. 'It will not rain for a month, perhaps not then; the fishermen said so this morning.'

There is something awful and weird in a rainless storm, that seems unnatural, and is more deadly far to vegetation than the storms that drench and flood the land. When they are passed they leave a benison behind them, at least to all the sylva and the flora, in the freshened soil, the deepened streams, the brimming rivers. But a rainless storm is like a loveless life; it brings and gains no blessing.

The children in the hollowed rock stood and listened to the sounds in the earth above. If it would only have rained, how welcome it would have been to hear the sweet cool fall of the big rain drops! But it seldom rains in August even in moist Maremma, and besides 'there is a red moon,' said Zirlo, in the common superstition of all husbandry.

To the red moon the vine-dresser and the tiller of the fields ascribe one-half their ills. When the red pestilent dew is over leaf and soil no peasant will ever believe that it is not the moon that causes it.