“Does it not seem, Dan, as if all the troubles we have gone through were a dark dream—as if there never had been any reality in them?” said Elspie.
“It does indeed seem so,” responded Dan, “and I hope and trust that we shall henceforth be able to think of them as nothing more than a troubled dream.”
“What iss that you will be sayin’ about troubled dreams?” asked old McKay, coming out of the house at the moment.
“We were just saying, daddy, that all our troubles seem—”
“Look yonder, Tan,” interrupted the old man, pointing with his pipe-stem to a certain part of the heavens. “What iss it that I see? A queer cloud, whatever! I don’t remember seein’ such a solid cloud as that in all my experience.”
“It is indeed queer. I hope it’s not what Fred Jenkins would call a ‘squall brewin’ up,’ for that wouldn’t improve the crops.”
“A squall!” exclaimed Jenkins, who chanced to come round the corner of the house at the moment, with a spade on his shoulder. “That’s never a squall—no, nor a gale, nor a simoon, nor anything else o’ the sort that I ever heard of. Why, it’s growin’ bigger an’ bigger!”
He shaded his eyes with his hand, and looked earnestly at the object in question, which did indeed resemble a very dense, yet not a black, cloud. For some moments the four spectators gazed in silence. Then old McKay suddenly dropped his pipe, and looked at Dan with an expression of intense solemnity.
“It iss my belief,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “that it is them wee deevils the grasshoppers!”
A very few minutes proved old McKay’s surmise to be correct. Once before, the colony had been devastated by this plague, and the memory of the result was enough to alarm the most courageous among the settlers who had experienced the calamity, though the new arrivals, being ignorant, were disposed to regard the visitation lightly at first. McKay himself became greatly excited when the air became darkened by the cloud, which, ever increasing in size, rapidly approached.