Suddenly, through the roar of the wind, was heard another sound, a rattling and rushing, as of loosened stones and of earth.  All his senses on the alert, the old man glanced swiftly up, and saw a row of four tall fir trees, which stood out like sentinels, on a ridge of the mountain, in the very path of the storm, turn over like nine-pins, one after the other, and tearing up the soil with their roots, slip down the mountain-side, dragging with them an avalanche of earth.  His eye darted to the cottage with a sudden fear.  Even as he looked, the wind was lifting some of the slates on the roof, rattling them, loosening them, and in a few moments would scatter them around like chaff, chaff that would bring death to any on whom it should chance to light.  With an odd, calculating look, the old man turned again to his digging, and, breathless as before, shovelled out the earth from the hole, with a speed of which his stiff and feeble frame would have been thought incapable; while now and again, without ceasing his work, he darted a backward glance at the doomed cottage.  It ought to stand until the hole was dug; and at least in the digging there was a chance of safety:  in going back to fetch the baby now, there was none.

After about five minutes, with a hideous yell, the demon tore in such fury across the mountain-side, that the old man would have been carried off his feet in a moment, and swept with the rest of the debris into the valley, but that he threw himself on the ground, clutching tightly with his fingers the edge of the hole he had dug.  In the bottom of the hole a thistle-down lay unmoved.  When the lull came, and he could raise his head, having escaped injury or death from falling stocks and stones, he darted over his shoulder a glance of awful anxiety at the cottage—­of such anxiety as a strong man may reach to the depths of but once or twice in his prime.  The roof of the cottage was gone; there were no fragments, for the wind was a clean sweeper; it had bodily vanished.  The walls stood.  He dragged himself unsteadily to his feet, and looked about for his spade.  It was nowhere to be seen; the besom of the gale had whirled it to some unknown limbo.

The hole was still not quite a foot and a half deep, and would not preserve the cradle, if placed therein, from the destroyer.  He shuffled back to the cottage with awkward, hasty steps.  The baby had cried itself to sleep, and lay in its cradle in the corner, unconscious of the ruin of its home.  The old man went to the hearth, on which the fire had been blown out, and from under the ashes dragged out a battered fire-shovel, its edge worn away, its handle loose.  It was the nearest approach to a spade that was left him.  Just as he got back to the hole another blast carried him off his feet, and he fell prostrate, this time clutching his substitute spade beneath him.  He rose again, stepped into the hole, crouching down as low as possible, and rapidly raised out of it one shovelful of earth after another; it was no sooner on the surface than it was whisked away like dust.  In the wood, a furlong to the right, some dozen trees were prostrated between one thrust of the shovel and the next; dark straight firs and silver birches, that slipped downwards to the valley like stiff, gleaming snakes.