ettles
upon some tall tree, and waves his wings, and sinks to the swaying
twigs. I hear too a quail piping from the meadow fence, and another
trilling his answering whistle from the hills. Nearer by, a tyrant
king-bird is poised on the topmost branch of a veteran pear-tree, and
now and then dashes down, assassin-like, upon some homebound,
honey-laden bee, and then with a smack of his bill resumes his predatory
watch.

A chicken or two lie in the sun, with a wing and a leg stretched
out,--lazily picking at the gravel, or relieving their _ennui_ from time
to time with a spasmodic rustle of their feathers. An old, matronly hen
stalks about the yard with a sedate step, and with quiet self-assurance
she utters an occasional series of hoarse and heated clucks. A speckled
turkey, with an astonished brood at her heels, is eying curiously, and
with earnest variations of the head, a full-fed cat, that lies curled
up, and dozing, upon the floor of the cottage porch.

As I sit thus, watching through the interstices of my leafy screen the
various images of country life, I hear distant mutterings from beyond
the hills.

The sun has thrown its shadow upon the pewter dial two hours beyond the
meridian line. Great cream colored heads of thunder-clouds are lifting
above the sharp, clear line of the western horizon; the light breeze
dies away, and the air becomes stifling, even under the shadow of my
withered boughs in the chamber-window. The white-capped clouds roll up
nearer and nearer to the sun, and the creamy masses below grow dark in
their seams. The mutterings, that came faintly before, now spread into
wide volumes of rolling sound, that echo again and again from the
eastward heights.

I hear in the deep intervals the men shouting to their teams in the
meadows; and great companies of startled swallows are dashing in all
directions around the gray roofs of the barn.

The clouds have now wellnigh reached the sun, which seems to shine the
fiercer for his coming eclipse. The whole west, as I look from the
sources of the brook to its lazy drift under the swamps that lie to the
south, is hung with a curtain of darkness; and like swift-working,
golden ropes, that lift it toward the zenith, long chains of lightning
flash through it; and the growing thunder seems like the rumble of the
pulleys.

I thrust away my azalia-boughs, and fling back the shattered blinds, as
the sun and the clouds meet, and my room darkens with the coming
s