"Plant your staff here, upright in the ground."
Hoel was startled, looked at him, then slowly obeyed.
The multitude still gathered, their gestures more threatening every moment.
"Call now, if you will, on your gods, that the staff may bud and blossom."
The peasant turned by a kind of instinct to the setting sun; clouds were mantling round it; its form was veiled; nothing seen but a dull and rusty stain of sunset fast paling into twilight. Hoel shook his head.
"You will not call on it to hear, to help you?"
He was answered by a gesture which implied that the power of Hoel's god was set for that night.
Then St. Joseph, with another ejaculation of prayer, struck his thorny staff into the ground beside the other. He made over it the sign of the cross, saying:
"By the grace of him who for us men hung on the tree on Calvary, wearing the thorny crown, I bid thee be as thou wert wont to be in the bloom of spring!"
There was still light enough to see how, here and there on the length of the staff, the shrivelled rind began to swell and to break, how the green buds shot forth and lengthened into twigs; how these ramified out again, branch from branch, sucker after sucker; how the old staff expanded into a shapely trunk of thorn-tree, crowned with a pollard head of rustling leaves.