It is necessary, in order that the thread of the narrative should not
be spun to a length which might fatigue the reader, that he should
imagine a week to have intervened between the scene with which the
preceding chapter closed and the events with which it is our intention
to resume its relation in this. The season was on the point of
changing its character; the verdure of summer giving place more
rapidly to the brown and party-coloured livery of the fall.[*] The
heavens were clothed in driving clouds, piled in vast masses one above
the other, which whirled violently in the gusts; opening,
occasionally, to admit transient glimpses of the bright and glorious
sight of the heavens, dwelling in a magnificence by far too grand and
durable to be disturbed by the fitful efforts of the lower world.
Beneath, the wind swept across the wild and naked prairies, with a
violence that is seldom witnessed in any section of the continent less
open. It would have been easy to have imagined, in the ages of fable,
that the god of the winds had permitted his subordinate agents to
escape from their den, and that they now rioted, in wantonness, across
wastes, where neither tree, nor work of man, nor mountain, nor
obstacle of any sort, opposed itself to their gambols.
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