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morning clouds, dispersed for a moment, like black birds, kept gathering and flying towards the summit of the heavens; hardly had the sun declined from noon when their flock had covered half the sky with an immense mantle; the wind drove it on faster and faster, the cloud grew more and more dense and hung lower and lower: finally, half torn away from the sky on one side, bending towards the earth, and spread out far and wide like a great sail, it gathered into itself all the winds and flew over the sky from the south to the west.

There was an instant of calm, and the air became dull and silent, as if dumb with terror. And the fields of grain, which just before, bowing to the earth and again shaking their golden ears on high, had tossed like waves, now stood motionless and gazed at the sky with bristling stalks. And the green willows and poplars by the roadside, which, like mourners by an open grave, had been bowing their heads to the earth, and brandishing their long arms, with their silver tresses spread out on the winds, now stood as if dead, with an expression of dumb grief like the statue of Niobe on Sipylos. Only the trembling aspen shook its grey leaves.

The cattle, usually loath to return homeward, now