Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/21



was towards the end of the seventies.

For a week the devil's own weather had raged over the district. The storm had swept from the east on the wings of wild, jagged, blue black clouds, lashing up the waters of the fiord, so that great masses of foam were thrown high on to the fields. In many places the peasants' winter corn was completely uprooted; the reeds and rushes in the bogs were beaten down, the meadows seared, and the ditches choked with sand and earth so that the water not finding an outlet spread itself over both fields and roads. There were uprooted trees in every direction, shattered telegraph posts, broken down corn stacks, and dead birds killed by the hurricane.

In the little village of Veilby which lay quite unprotected on the top of a hill, an old barn blew down one night with such a crash, that all the people sprang up out of their beds and rushed 3