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HOME > Children's Novel > Jan of the Windmill A Story of the Plains > CHAPTER XXXVII.
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CHAPTER XXXVII.
 SUNSHINE AFTER STORM.  
It had been a wet morning.  The heavy rain-clouds rolled over the plains, hanging on this side above the horizon as if in an instant they must fall and crush the solid earth, and passing away on that side in dark, slanting veils of shower; giving to the vast monotony of the wide field of view that strange interchange of light and shadow, gleam and gloom, which makes the poetry of the plains.
 
The rain had passed.  The gray mud of the chalk roads dried up into white dust almost beneath the travellers’ feet as they came out again after temporary shelter; and that brightest, tenderest smile, with which, on such days, the sun makes evening atonement for his absence, shone and sparkled, danced and glowed from the windmill to the water-meads.  It reopened the flowers, and drew fragrant answer from the meadow-sweet and the bay-leaved willow.  It made the birds sing, and the ploughboy whistle, and the old folk toddle into their gardens to smell the herbs.  It cherished silent satisfaction on the bronze face of Rufus resting on his paws, and lay over Master Swift’s wan brow like the aureole of some austere saint canonized, just on this side the gates of Paradise.
 
The simile is not inapt, for the coarse and vigorous features of the schoolmaster had been refined to that peculiar nobleness which, perhaps, the sharp tool of suffering—used to its highest ends—can alone produce.  And the smile of patience, like a victor’s wreath, lay now where hot passions and imperious temper had once struggled and been overcome.
 
The schoolmaster was paralyzed in his lower limbs, and he sat in a wheel-chair of his own devising, which he could propel with his own hands.  The agonizing anxiety and suspense which followed Jan’s disappearance had broken him down, and this was the end.  Rufus was still his only housekeeper, but a woman from the village came in to give him necessary help.
 
“And it be ’most like waiting upon a angel,” said she.
 
This woman had gone for the night, and Master Swift sat in his invalid chair in the little porch, where he could touch the convolvulus bells with his hand, and see what some old pupil of his had done towards “righting up” the garden.  It was an instance of that hardly earned grace of patience in him that he did not vex himself to see how sorely the garden suffered by his helplessness.
 
Not without cause was the eve............
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