h,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective before the
unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of clouds that dance
to some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or night, once they
have settled to their work, one sees from the valley only the blank wall
of their tents stretched along the ranges. To get the real effect of a
mountain storm you must be inside.

One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born
of experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the canon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat
down the mimulus beside the brook.

You shelter on the lee of some strong pine with shut-winged butterflies
and merry, fiddling creatures of the wood. Runnels of rain water from
the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles into rivulets; the
streams froth and rise in their banks. The sky is white with cloud; the
sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear. The summer showers leave no
wake.

Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the
lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.
Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather-grown headland to
watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region
begins a little darkling of the sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a
smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.

It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret canons.
Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and
drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the
glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.

The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storm