[Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hemon]@TWC D-Link book
Maria Chapdelaine

CHAPTER VII
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A MEAGER REAPING SEPTEMBER arrived, and the dryness so welcome for the hay-making persisted till it became a disaster.

According to the Chapdelaines, never had the country been visited with such a drought as this, and every day a fresh motive was suggested for the divine displeasure.
Oats and wheat took on a sickly colour ere attaining their growth; a merciless sun withered the grass and the clover aftermath, and all day long the famished cows stood lowing with their heads over the fences.

They had to be watched continually, for even the meager standing crop was a sore temptation, and never a day went by but one of them broke through the rails in the attempt to appease her hunger among the grain.
Then, of a sudden one evening, as though weary of a constancy so unusual, the wind shifted and in the morning came the rain.

It fell off and on for a week, and when it ceased and the wind hauled again to the north-west, autumn had come.
The autumn! And it seemed as though spring were here but yesterday.
The grain was yet unripe, though yellowed by the drought; nothing save the hay was in barn; the other crops could draw nutriment from the soil only while the too brief summer warmed it, and already autumn was here, the forerunner of relentless winter, of the frosts, and soon the snows ...
Between the wet days there was still fine bright weather, hot toward noon, when one might fancy that all was as it had been: the harvest still unreaped, the changeless setting of spruces and firs, and ever the same sunsets of gray and opal, opal and gold, and skies of misty blue above the same dark woodland.

But in the mornings the grass was sometimes white with rime, and swiftly followed the earliest dry frosts which killed and blackened the tops of the potatoes.
Then, for the first time, a film of ice appeared upon the drinking-trough; melted by the afternoon sun it was there a few days later, and yet a third time in the same week.


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