Again, and yet again, the thunder, breaking, travels ponderously along the clouds, the gray-steel flash of the lightning like a torch before its rolling chariot. Now they plunge, big-dropped, crackling, and resilient, clamoring on the reverberating stones so thin the film of spray of the shattered drops that the white-tufted dandelion loses not one light seed in the shelter of this rock, where, like a host of fairy helms, the rose bush bristles against the rain a myriad green buds.
Nearer and nearer the blue lines of the rain shadow and streak the woods, the hills, and the heavens. The thunder seems the sound of its mighty flowing. The noon was clear but now, as the sun sinks, the broadening black of one tremendous cloud breaks into peaks, creviced and ravined and rivered with burning gold, cascading and circling and cleaving their crags of storm. The morn, like some blear-eyed beggar, came trailing her tatters in, streaming with vapor, dark and dismal, her sodden hair blinding her eyes. Its flight is as the swift unfurling of a ribbon of living crimson uniting tree to tree, with a bright bowknot of silken song at either end. The elecampane and the black-eyed Susan, with their frank, wide eyes of gold and bronze the thimble-weed, with its terminal greenish white blossoms and stiff thyrsus-like thimbles of green thrust from and over the surrounding briers and weeds and the lacy white of the wild-carrot together with the bugled scarlet of the trumpet-vine, make a perfect riot of color in an angle of an old worm-fence separating a bit of fallow-field from a bit of sown, wherein a bob-white keeps calling repeatedly tying, as it were, with a thread of three notes, the stillness and the heat: the first two, soft, careful, and preliminary the last one, whipped out emphatically, straight as a thread thrust through the eye of a needle, completing and forming the final knot to its own satisfaction and that also of the listening summer day.Īcross a wooded vista a red-bird suddenly wings.
Great clumps of the Mayapples, beaten down and ruined by the rain here and there by the wayside, show the smooth green and ripening yellow of their oval fruit, often too large and heavy for the stalk to support. Toadstools, large and little, overrun the woods to-day after a day and night of rain: red and yellow and white, green and saffron and gray upright, sidewise some with the woodland loam and leaves, upheaved with them, still strewing their tops graceful and slender, or bloated and distorted they stand poisonous-looking some of them, and of a blue mottled color, which, when broken, exude a thin cobalt-colored watery juice that stains whatever it touches some of them a burnt-umber brown and of enormous size, looking like huge flat hats, rims turned up, swollen with rain, rotting and reeking in the underwoods and filling the air with a fetid fungous odor. The sea-pink and the tall wild bell-flower divide the honors of July the one, pearly pink, the other, turquoise-azure, conspicuously placed in her flower-garland in fragrant fraternity, each proud of its showy loveliness and of the abundant beauty of the month that bore them.
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