The feast of Jal was celebrated in order to secure a good seed-bed and springing time for the grain.

Juanna and Otter had abolished the hideous ceremonies of that feast, and the People of the Mist watched for the results with a gloomy and superstitious eye.

If the season proved more than ordinarily good, all might go well, but if it chanced to be bad----! And, as was to be expected, seeing how much depended upon it, this spring proved the very worst which any living man could remember in that country.

Day after day the face of the sun was hidden with mists that only yielded to the bitter winds which blew from the mountains at night, so that when the spring should have been a month old, the temperature was still that of mid-winter and the corn would not start at all.
Leonard and Juanna soon discovered what this meant for them, and never was the aspect of weather more anxiously scanned than by these two from day to day.

In vain; every morning the blanket of cold mist fell like a cloud, blotting out the background of the mountains, and every night the biting wind swept down upon them from the fields of snow, chilling them to the marrow.
This state of things--wretched enough it itself--was only one of many miseries which afflicted them.