The man whom we had first seen held in his hand a tattered shawl, with which he now began patching a portion of his tent, saying at the same time that there was a storm a-brewing.

“Ay, is there!” said Mrs. Butler; “and a storm like the one when I seed Leeds’s devil”—­

“Hush!” interrupted her ragged companion, with a look of terror.  “What’s the good o’ namin’ him, and allus talkin’ about him, when yer don’t never know as he ar’n’t byside ye?”

“I’ll devil yer!” shrieked the crone, through a half-eaten tomato.  “Finish mendin’ 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