COUNTRY LIFE
ONE morning during the recent unsettled weather I stood at the gate to the cornfield that slopes away from my garden, southward to a disused quarry, and thence to the bottom of the valley. The stormy west winds make this valley a trumpet, and I delight to listen to the infinite variety of sounds which thunder and lightning can produce between those confines of woodland and meadow. After a disturbed night day came in a restless mood. The first bird-chorus began, but broke up into anxious twitterings and warnings. The cattle stood under the trees with their heads lowered together. The sky was filling again with lumbering banks of cloud, and light was shrinking eastward instead of spreading from it. The thunder began. Then a click-click of lightning, like a switch being thrown, and again more thunder, growing with an increasing menace. I tried to note the different tones of it, and to find words to describe it. But like all the primitive forces, such as the agonies of child-birth, the love of God, the manifest of pity, thunder is something that is indescribable. One can be fanciful about it, and speak of celestial moving-men, all of them sullen, and one of them insane, lumping the furniture of the skies and only in- creasing the confusion. Rain drove me home before I could find even an inadequate phrase, and as I hurried up the lane I contented myself with the pleasure of the chilly first drops on my face, and the delicious odour of damped soil. I smelled, too, at my first sprig of honeysuckle, that reminder of childhood, returning with rapturous evasiveness.
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