LODORE AFTER STORM.
Five days of continual tempest and five nights of storm-wind from the Atlantic had tried the nerves and tempers and tested the sleeping powers of all in the Keswick Vale. Nothing like wind to set folks 'fratching'; and that anybody was still on speaking terms with his neighbour argued well for the kindliness of the townsmen and villagers.
At last it would seem as if the wind had blown itself out, and at six o'clock of a grey February evening silence and calm fell upon the sodden, weary vale. But an ominous cloud-pack boiled up over the western hills, and the barometer went down two inches. The cattle were scarcely 'suppered up' for the night in the farmsteads and the shopmen had scarcely clanged down their last shutter, when the wind again awoke, and the hills thundered and the trees groaned, and we knew that America had sent us another cyclone. The hail-showers thrashed the panes, the windows rattled, the chimneys moaned and sighed, and though tired men and women went to bed, it was only to feel their house-walls shake as if an earthquake shock were passing underneath, and only to wonder which would be the first chimney-stack to fall. The wind grew to a hurricane, and people as they lay in sleepless fear upon their beds heard strange voices in the storm—cries of sailors in agony upon a bitter shore or perishing in the deep. Then the wind would be heard to try all round the house and see if perchance a window-frame would give an entrance and indoor havoc be possible; or a slate would whirl up with a crack and come down clattering on the roof and spin off into the darkness.
The dawn broke dimly, and the pastures of the middle vale lay like a wan sea with isles of emerald. Broken boughs hung gaunt and creaking upon the nearest trees, and the Irish yews curtsied and danced and split themselves into a hundred spires of nodding darkness against the angry sky. But the hurricane, however much it might make man cower and fear, had no power upon the thrush, who saw, behind the hurricane light of cheerless morn, the dawn of springtide and love and calm. No storm could
'Quell or disconcert her golden tongue,'
and there, while the wind fluffed her breast to twice its size, she fluted from the swaying holly tree her old familiar call to the slow to 'be quick! be quick!' to the drowsy, to 'pray, get up! get up!' and then to the sad to 'cheer up now! cheer up! cheer up!'
I answered her challenge and arose. The lake from end to end was ridded with foam, and great clouds of water, torn from the surface, were marching from west to east. Borrodale was black with storm. There was no snow on Skiddaw, though the sleet had in a night turned its fine old head grizzled grey, but over Grasmoor and over Grisedale it seemed as if some huge ocean wave had broken and left its froth behind it.
Nearer, however, than on Grasmoor and on Grisedale there was snow. Far down beyond the purpling 'Walla' woodland, lay, in a crevice of the hills between Gowder Crag and Shepherd's Crag, a mighty drift of seeming winter whiteness. That was no gift of winter; it was the gift of the past night's rain. Gazing at it through a good field-glass one could see that the white drift was a falling torrent, and as one gazed one almost, in fancy, heard