But the swift cloud had already covered half the sky, and the bursts of thunder followed one another now in quicker succession.  And as suddenly as the thunder had come, came the wind.  A solitary old sycamore, leaning over the water on the Kentucky shore, a mile away, was first to fall.  In the lurid darkness, August and Julia saw it meet its fate.  Then the rail fences on the nearer bank were scattered like kindling-wood, and some of the sturdy old apple-trees of the orchard in the river-bottom were uprooted, while others were stripped of their boughs.  Julia clung to August and said something, but he could only see her lips move; her voice was drowned by the incessant roar of the thunder.  And then the hurricane struck them, and they half-ran and were half-carried down the rear slope of the hill.  Now they saw for the first time that the people were gone.  The instinct of self-preservation had proven stronger than their fanaticism, and a contagious panic had carried them into a hay-barn near by.

Not knowing where the rest had gone, August and Julia only thought of regaining the castle.  They found the path blocked by fallen trees, and it was slow and dangerous work, waiting for flashes of lightning to show them their road.  In making a long detour they lost the path.  After some minutes, in a lull in the thunder, August heard a shout, which he answered, and presently Philosopher Andrew appeared with a lantern, his grizzled hair and beard flying in the wind.

“What ho, my friends!” he cried.  “This is the way you go to heaven together!  You’ll live through many a storm yet!”

Guided by his thorough knowledge of the ground, they had almost reached the castle, when they were startled by piteous cries.  Leaving August with Julia, Andrew climbed a fence, and went down into a ravine to find poor Bill Day in an agony of terror, crying out in despair, believing that the day of doom had already come, and that he was about to be sent into well-deserved perdition.  Andrew stooped over him with his lantern, but the poor fellow, giving one look at the shaggy face, shrieked madly, and rushed away into the woods.

“I believe,” said the Philosopher, when he got back to August, “I believe he took me for the devil.”

CHAPTER XLIV.

SQUARING ACCOUNTS.

The summer storm had spent itself by daylight, and the sun rose on that morning after the world’s end much as it had risen on other mornings, but it looked down upon prostrate trees and scattered fences and roofless barns.  And the minds of the people were in much the same disheveled state as the landscape.  One simple-minded girl was a maniac.  Some declared that the world had ended, and that this was the new earth, if people only had faith to receive it; some still waited for the end, and with some the reaction from credulity had already set in, a reaction that carried them into the blankest atheism and boldest immorality.  People who had spent the summer in looking for a change that would relieve them from all responsibility, now turned reluctantly toward the commonplace drudgery of life.  It is the evil of all day-dreaming—­day-dreaming about the other world included—­that it unfits us for duty in this world of tangible and inevitable facts.