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A loud peal of thunder was heard in answer to his prayer; and a second sign was sent by the voice of a woman in the house. She was one of twelve maid-servants, whose duty it was to grind wheat and barley for the daily supply of bread. The others had finished their task, but she, being old and weak, was still toiling at her mill.

Sherman and the girls burst out laughing, and there was an echoing peal of amusement in the hall. The affair would not have seemed half so ridiculous in the daylight, but to be called out of bed at that hour to listen to such a dream, told only as Mary Ware could tell it, impressed the entire family as one of the funniest things that had ever happened. They laughed till the tears came.

But the inhabitants themselves do not seem strong or healthy. One sees a good many deformed people, and they all look pale and thin much less robust than the people of the Black Forest. But that may come from their poverty the peasants of the Black Forest are proverbially well off." A distant, very distant, peal of thunder was heard at this moment.

And before the house in which Catherine died, there loitered many stragglers, gossips, of the hamlet, subscribers to the news-room hard by, to guess, and speculate, and wonder why, from the church behind, there rose the merry peal of the marriage-bell!

And then I came to an open parade above the town "except the Schlosskirche Weathercock no biped stands so high." The night had swept away all details of buildings. Nuremberg lay below like a dark etching, the centuries folded and creased in its obscurities. Then from some gaunt tower came a peal of bells, the hour maybe, and then an answering peal.

"I know it's dreadfully wicked to behave in this manner, but I can't help myself," and off the child went again; while Nellie, unable to resist, joined in the merry peal. When both stopped at length, the tears were running down their cheeks, at the sight of which Winnie nearly repeated the performance.

Stanton forgot his cowardly guide, his loneliness, his danger amid an approaching storm and an inhospitable country, where his name and country would shut every door against him, and every peal of thunder would be supposed justified by the daring intrusion of a heretic in the dwelling of an old Christian, as the Spanish Catholics absurdly term themselves, to mark the distinction between them and the baptized Moors.

Nearer, and nearer, came the sound, until at last the storm overspread the locality in all its fury. Flash upon flash of lightning burst forth from the heavens. Deafening peals of thunder followed each flash. Finally, one flash brighter than any of the others, one peal more deafening than those preceding it, and the storm had passed.

The walls are hung with tapestry, the figures of which are faded and look like unsubstantial shapes melting away from sight.... The murmur of voices and the peal of remote laughter no longer reach the ear.

Before, however, this event occurred, the war in Kansas rang a prophetic peal of warning through the land; and the struggle there begun between New England emigrants bent on founding a free state, and Missouri border ruffians determined to make the new territory a slaveholding addition to the South, might have roused the whole North and West to the imminence of the peril, by which the safety of the Union was threatened.