Page:Pontoppidan - Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896).djvu/22

 into the street in their night clothes. A dozen chimney pots were blown down the same night, and whole flower beds uprooted in the Parsonage garden; and all the starlings' building boxes were blown out of the trees.

Nay the heavenly powers did not even spare the Provst; while the storm was at its height he stepped out one afternoon on to the verandah to look round at the scene of devastation; the wind lifted the hat from his white head, threw it to the ground like a ball, trundled it along the road, and in spite of all his efforts to stop it, swept it along in a swirling dust-cloud. It only relinquished its prey in a ditch behind some blackthorn bushes, a long way down the high road, to cast its force over a little girl who lived beyond the common, and who weeping bitterly, was struggling home from school. Then with howls and shrieks as of a hundred devils let loose, the wind enveloped the worn out little creature, puffed up her skirts and drove her nearer and nearer the edge of the road, till it at last overturned her by a corner stone, and sent her rolling with despairing cries into an old gravel pit. Here her little doubled up corpse was found next day by the searchers; a new catechism still tightly pressed to her sheltering bosom, with convulsive grasp.

Never in the memory of man had such weather been known.

"The Lord preserve those at sea," the people shouted to each other through the uproar, when