Sir Nigel, Arthur Conan Doyle [good e books to read .txt] 📗

ople were blessed and shriven by the tremblingpriests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling fromthe woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. All was still,and nothing moved, save only the great cloud which rolled up andonward, with fold on fold from the black horizon. To the west wasthe light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank,creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam fadedaway and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leadenarch.

Then the rain began to fall. All day it rained, and all the nightand all the week and all the month, until folk had forgotten theblue heavens and the gleam of the sunshine. It was not heavy, butit was steady and cold and unceasing, so that the people wereweary of its hissing and its splashing, with the slow drip fromthe eaves. Always the same thick evil cloud flowed from east towest with the rain beneath it. None could see for more than abow-shot from their dwellings for the drifting veil of ther