Not until the rain and hail came on did the blackbirds cease to flute or the swallows to skim high overhead. How does this accord with the poet Thomson’s description of the behaviour of animals during a summer thunderstorm, or rather the boding silence that precedes it?—
“Prone to the lowest vale the aerial tribes
Descend. The tempest-loving raven scarce
Dares wing the dubious dusk. In rueful gaze
The cattle stand,” etc.
Our birds and beasts in Berkshire are not nearly so frightened at thunder as those in Thomson’s time must have been, but then there were no railway trains in Thomson’s time!
The poet speaks of unusual darkness brooding in the sky before the thunder raises his tremendous voice. This is so; I have known it so dark, or dusk rather, that the birds flew to roost and bats came out. But it is not always that “a calm” or “boding silence reigns.” Sometimes the wind sweeps here and there in uncertain gusts before the storm, the leaf-laden branches bending hither and thither before them.
We came to a part of the road at last where the gable end of a pretty porter’s lodge peeped over the trees, and here pulled up. The thunder was very loud, and lightning incessant, only it did not rain then. Nothing deterred, Lovat, kettle in hand, lowered himself from the coupé and disappeared to beg for water. As there was no other house near at hand it was natural for the good woman of the lodge, seeing a little boy with a fisherman’s red cap on, standing at her porch begging for water, to ask,—“Wherever do you come from?” Lovat pointed upwards in the direction of the caravan, which was hidden from view by the trees, and said,—
“From up there.”
“Do ye mean to tell me,” she said, “that you dropped out of the clouds in a thunderstorm with a tin-kettle in your hand?”
But he got the water, the good lady had her joke, and we had tea.
The storm grew worse after this. Inez grew frightened, and asked me to play.
“Do play the fiddle, pa!” she beseeched. So, while the “Lightning gleamed across the rift,” and the thunder crashed overhead, “pa” fiddled, even as Nero fiddled when Rome was burning.