________________________________________________
_ WEATHER FOR USE IN THIS BOOK.
Selected from the Best Authorities.
A brief though violent thunderstorm which had raged over the city was
passing away; but still, though the rain had ceased more than an hour
before, wild piles of dark and coppery clouds, in which a fierce and
rayless glow was laboring, gigantically overhung the grotesque and
huddled vista of dwarf houses, while in the distance, sheeting high over
the low, misty confusion of gables and chimneys, spread a pall of dead,
leprous blue, suffused with blotches of dull, glistening yellow, and with
black plague-spots of vapor floating and faint lightnings crinkling on
its surface. Thunder, still muttering in the close and sultry air, kept
the scared dwellers in the street within, behind their closed shutters;
and all deserted, cowed, dejected, squalid, like poor, stupid, top-heavy
things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest, stood the drenched
structures on either side of the narrow and crooked way, ghastly and
picturesque, under the giant canopy. Rain dripped wretchedly in slow
drops of melancholy sound from their projecting eaves upon the broken
flagging, lay there in pools or trickled into the swollen drains, where
the fallen torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river.
"The Brazen Android."-W. D. O'Connor.
The fiery mid-March sun a moment hung
Above the bleak Judean wilderness;
Then darkness swept upon us, and 't was night.
"Easter-Eve at Kerak-Moab."--Clinton Scollard.
The quick-coming winter twilight was already at hand. Snow was again
falling, sifting delicately down, incidentally as it were.
"Felicia." Fanny N. D. Murfree.
Merciful heavens! The whole west, from right to left, blazes up with a
fierce light, and next instant the earth reels and quivers with the awful
shock of ten thousand batteries of artillery. It is the signal for the
Fury to spring--for a thousand demons to scream and shriek--for
innumerable serpents of fire to writhe and light up the blackness.
Now the rain falls-now the wind is let loose with a terrible shriek--now
the lightning is so constant that the eyes burn, and the thunder-claps
merge into an awful roar, as did the 800 cannon at Gettysburg. Crash!
Crash! Crash! It is the cottonwood trees falling to earth. Shriek!
Shriek! Shriek! It is the Demon racing along the plain and uprooting
even the blades of grass. Shock! Shock! Shock! It is the Fury
flinging his fiery bolts into the bosom of the earth.--
"The Demon and the Fury." M. Quad.
Away up the gorge all diurnal fancies trooped into the wide liberties of
endless luminous vistas of azure sunlit mountains beneath the shining
azure heavens. The sky, looking down in deep blue placidities, only here
and there smote the water to azure emulations of its tint.--
"In the Stranger's Country." Charles Egbert Craddock.
There was every indication of a dust-storm, though the sun still shone
brilliantly. The hot wind had become wild and rampant. It was whipping
up the sandy coating of the plain in every direction. High in the air
were seen whirling spires and cones of sand--a curious effect against the
deep-blue sky. Below, puffs of sand were breaking out of the plain in
every direction, as though the plain were alive with invisible horsemen.
These sandy cloudlets were instantly dissipated by the wind; it was the
larger clouds that were lifted whole into the air, and the larger clouds
of sand were becoming more and more the rule.
Alfred's eye, quickly scanning the horizon, descried the roof of the
boundary-rider's hut still gleaming in the sunlight. He remembered the
hut well. It could not be farther than four miles, if as much as that,
from this point of the track. He also knew these dust-storms of old;
Bindarra was notorious for them: Without thinking twice, Alfred put,
spurs to his horse and headed for the hut. Before he had ridden half the
distance the detached clouds of sand banded together in one dense
whirlwind, and it was only owing to his horse's instinct that he did not
ride wide of the hut altogether; for during the last half-mile he never
saw the hut, until its outline loomed suddenly over his horse's ears; and
by then the sun was invisible.--
"A Bride from the Bush."
It rained forty days and forty nights.--Genesis.
-THE END-
American Claimant, a novel by Mark Twain _
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