ly.
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 storms
that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of
live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines
for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. They shake down
avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden
floods like battle fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and
boulders. They would be kind if they could, but have more important
matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not
rain, rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is
white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.

All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in the
geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I remember one
night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry
of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under a
slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the
heavy denotation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale
rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from
hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying a
very human woe. I remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake
made milky white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed
into it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were trout enough
for what was left of the lake next year and the beginning of a meadow
about its upper rim. What taxed me most in the wreck of one of my
favorite canons by cloudburst was to see a bobcat mother mouthing her
drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash, far above the
limit of accustomed waters, but