worst form it took was when it poured persistently and unmercifully from morning to night.
The new moons came in with rain and went out with rain, and every day of the calendar was alike wet. The wind veered about to every point of the compass, and heaped up banks of fog out to sea, and heavy masses of cloud up in the mountains, which finally drifted together, and poured down their contents in torrents all along the west coast.
And now the storms began in earnest, and went soughing through the trees in the avenue, and whistling in the rigging of the vessels that were laid up for the winter.
In the old house at Sandsgaard each separate wind had its own pet corner, to which it returned with delight every autumn. The north wind came howling along between the warehouses; the south wind took the wet leaves from the garden and hurled them in handfuls against the window-panes; the east wind whirled down the chimneys till all the rooms were full of smoke; while the pet amusement of the west wind was to make a clatter with all the loose tiles on the roof, during the whole livelong night.
The Consul kept going and looking at the barometer, and tapping it to see if the quicksilver was rising or falling: but, to tell the truth, it did not seem to make much matter which it did; for the sky, the clouds, the rain, and the storm had all got into such a jumble, that the weather continued equally abominable, week after week, during the whole winter.
In the ship-yard work went on but slowly, for
