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Updated: June 15, 2025
The sound of bullets on breastplates and helmets and epaulettes is like a shower of hailstones upon a sheet of metal. Twice, thrice, nay more a dozen times they return to the charge, and the plateau gleams with brandished steel like a thousand flashes of simultaneous fork-lightning on the vast canopy of a stormy sky.
A man's life being to be taken and the price of it got, the hailstones to arrest the purpose must lie larger and deeper than those. He crashed through them, leaving marks in the fast-melting slush that were mere shapeless holes; one might have fancied, following, that the very fashion of humanity had departed from his feet.
It is certain that he was an expert marksman, and that he did Clement good service by directing the artillery of S. Angelo. If we believed all his assertions, however, we should have to suppose that nothing memorable happened without his intervention. In his own eyes his whole life was a miracle. The very hailstones that fell upon his head could not be grasped in both hands.
Then a breathless, unreal calm, through which distant echoes rumbled; then a dead silence, shattered at last by a heavy, distant clatter, as though myriad big hailstones were falling on a pavement. And then another silence the period of reeling calm after an earthquake. "O God!" wailed the girl; "it is horrible!" "You've got to get out of here the whole of Manti will be here in a few minutes!
Meet me here this time to-morrow." Each word smote like pelting hailstones, and he saw all her loathing printed on her face. "I have an engagement that may detain me beyond this hour; but if I live, I will be as punctual as circumstances permit."
Then as the first thick darkness began to pass away, we saw that the air was white with falling hailstones of an extraordinary size and appearance. They were big as fowls' eggs, but not egg-shaped: they were flat, and about half-an-inch thick, and being white, looked like little blocks or bricklets made of compressed snow.
It is a most lovely morning; the bruising hailstones and the moistening rain have proved themselves stimulants in the laboratory of the wild-thyme shrubs, setting free and disseminating a new supply of aroma; and while until now the voice of animate nature has been conspicuous by its absence, the morning vespers of song-birds seed almost to be issuing, like flowers, from the ground.
They laughed and did as they were told; whereupon they were drowned in a shower of cherries cherries falling like hailstones, hitting them on their heads, their cheeks, their noses filling their caps and pinafores, and then rolling and tumbling on to the grass, till it was strewn thick as leaves in autumn with the rosy fruit.
Particles of dirt were rattling from the roots of the fallen tree, sounding like hailstones as they fell to the rocks in the cave. Then a faint ray of light appeared under the bottom of the mass of roots. "Somebody is coming," whispered Tad. "Stand perfectly still until I tell you to move." "They can't see us at once. Don't make a sound on your life."
On another occasion, while a chorus descriptive of a storm was being sung, a hurricane burst over the Abbey, and the fierce rattling of hailstones, accompanied by peals of thunder, kept time to the grand music of Handel.
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