A quarter of an hour later Lynde was on the way to Geneva. Life and the
world had somehow darkened for him within the hour. It seemed to him
incredible that that was the same road over which he had passed so
joyously two days before. The swollen torrents now rushed vengefully
through the arches of the stone bridges; the low-hanging opaque clouds
pressed the vitality out of the atmosphere; in the melancholy gray light
the rain-soaked mountains wore a human aspect of dolor. He was not sorry
when the mist gathered like frost on the carriage windows and shut the
landscape from his sight.

The storm had been terrible in Geneva and in the neighborhood. It was a
scene of devastation all along the road approaching the town. Most of
the trees in the suburbs had been completely stripped of foliage by the
hailstones; the leaves which still clung to the bent twigs were slit as
if volleys of buckshot had been fired into them. But the saddest thing
to see was field after field of rich grain mown within a few inches of
the ground by those swift, keen sickles which no man's hand had held. In
the section of the city through which Lynde passed to the railroad the
streets were literally strewn with broken tiles and chimney-pots. In
some places the brown and purple fragments lay ankle-deep, like leaves
in autumn. Hundreds of houses had been unroofed and thousands of acres
laid waste in a single night. It will take the poor of the canton fifty
years to forget the summer storm of 1875.

By noon the next day Lynde was in Paris. As he stepped from the station
and stood under the blue sky in the sparkling Parisian atmosphere, the
gloom and desolation he had left behind at Geneva and Chamouni affected
him like the remembrance of a nightmare. For a brief space he forgot his
sorrowful errand; then it came back to him with its heaviness redoubled