Country Life
By IAN NIALL Emma the house was falling down, or someone was rolling large boulders about and bringing them back in a circle to repeat the treatment. It seemed like this when I was half awake in the early hours, but, in a moment or two, the dark sky above the equally black hill cracked in the pattern of lightning, while the big stones went rolling on into the back country, and I settled to await the thunder's return. In the lull I remembered the swifts flying low the previous evening. 1 remembered, too, a supper-time headache which I had put down to the little wine taken 'for my stomach's sake' at lunch that day. The headache hadn't been due to liver, but was the work of the built-in barometer that operates when there is thunder about. At length the boulders came rolling back A sparrow in the eaves complained in a trilling chirp and then immediately fell silent while the house reverberated. The sky was once again patterned with lightning over in the north- west where the heart of the storm was centred. The height of those swifts had certainly indicated a change. Insects had been keeping nearer the ground and a hive of bees I had looked at had been singularly
inactive in the afternoon. This, of course, meant rain. I had hardly mulled the thought when rain spattered the windows, but the stone-rolling diminished in the distance, and after a while I stopped thinking of bees and swifts and fell asleep.
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