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But now the rick-yard was heaped high with golden sheaves; the carts came in steady lines, creaking under endless loads, from those fields which, two years later, lay scorched with drought, and over which famine brooded. The peasant girls tossed the grain, with forked boughs, to the threshing-machine, tended by other girls.
They all testified that they were paying as much attention to their grounds as they ever did, but that their provisions had been cut short by the drought. They had their land all prepared for a new crop, and were only waiting for rain to put in the seed. Mr. Bourne corroborated their statement, and remarked, that he never found the least difficulty in procuring laborers.
The frost that imprisons the alligator in the Mississippi as effectually cuts it off from food and action as the drought which incarcerates the crocodile in the sun-burnt clay of a Ceylon tank.
Lastly, amongst the natives about, and some of the Boers too, I am sorry to say, she had the reputation of being the best of rainmakers, and many were the head of cattle that she earned by prophesying the break-up of a drought, or the end of continual rains.
A solitary enough spot in all conscience! Yet for the last ten years two men have lived here, taking their chances of sickness, drought, floods, and natives; raising cattle in peace and contentment. Terribly rough, uncouth chaps, of course? Not a bit of it! two men, gentlemen by birth and education, one the brother of a bishop, the other a man who started life as an artist in Paris.
Since rain was observed to fall from the sky, it was held that in time of drought it might be obtained by casting water into the air and letting it fall, or by dipping a stone in water and letting it drip; in general, by any process in which water falls on the ground.
Is it nothing to see the crop, on which so much care has been expended, which you have watched day by day through all the vicissitudes of the season, through drought, and flood, and blight; is it nothing to see it safely harvested, and your shelves filling day by day with fine sound cakes, the representatives of wealth, that will fill your pockets with commission, and build up your name as a careful and painstaking planter?
Some such little thing, little in our view of it, made the fatal turn; we received the grace of God less and less: we heeded not the change for a season; and when it was so marked that we could not but heed it, then we had ceased to regard it; and so it was that the spring of our life was dried up: and it is of no more avail to our present and future state, that we once received grace, than the rain of last winter will be sufficient to ripen the summer's harvest, if from this time forward we have nothing but drought and cold.
"How about Glinda?" suggested Tweaty, who was still in the form of a small orange pachyderm. "She's a Good Witch, you know. Wouldn't she have one of those Mars things?" "An Anmars," corrected Ozma. "Yes, I'm sure she would. But the last I heard from her, she was going to visit some place that was having a drought and try to correct it. A place called Yoraitia. I do not know where it is."
He was mouthing the words of some Bible Prophet. "A Sword is upon her horses, and upon her chariots, and upon all the mingled people that are in the midst of her, and they shall become as women. A Sword is upon her treasures, and they shall be robbed; a drought is upon her waters, and they shall be dried up; for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols."
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