I am not the oldest inhabitant, and don’t know what sort of storms they used to have here before the flood; but I’ll wager a corner lot against a plug of tobacco, that this section, for the last twenty years, has not snoozed through a rougher night than the one just past.
It would have been a glorious night for a revivalist to stir up the masses. Converts would have crowded in like grists to a mill after harvest. Since the last great earthquake I have not felt so much concern about my future state as I did about twelve o’clock last night. I arose from bed, and went to rummaging books, trying to find the description of a storm that would equal ours. I found the tempest that Tam O’Shanter faced the night he discovered the witches, and the one in which King Lear was cavorting around, bare-headed, and that which made Cæsar take an account of stock and turn to interpreting dreams, and jumbled them all together; but the product was unequal to the fury that was raging without. There was no more similarity than a baby’s rattle bears to a Chinese gong.
A ROUSING EVENT.
Then I fished out the storm that howled while Macbeth was murdering Duncan, and tumbled it in with the others. This addition made things about even. The “lamentations heard i’ the air” of Macbeth’s tempest were a fair precedent of the clamorous uproar from the fire bell in the City Hall tower. Only an earthquake was lacking to enable us to say, “The earth was feverous, and did shake,” or boast a night outvieing four of the roughest on record, all woven into one.
It had one good effect, however—one for which poison and boot-jacks have been tried in vain: it did silence the dogs and cats. Their midnight carousals were as rare as they were in Paris just before the capitulation. Quarrelsome curs postponed the settlement of their little differences and defiant barks until such times as they would be able to discover themselves whether they barked or yawned, and cats sought other places besides a fellow’s window-sill to express opinions about each other or chant their tales of love.
I know the rain is refreshing, the wind purifying, the lightning grand, and the thunder awe-inspiring; but as the poor land-lubber advised, when he was clinging to the spar of the wrecked vessel, “Praise the sea, but keep on land,” so I say to those people who want to prick up their willing ears, like a war-horse, to catch the sublime rumble of heaven’s artillery, or sit by their window and blink at the blazing sky, like a bedazzled owl at a calcium light; but I know one individual who could have got along quite as well if there had raged no war of the elements. He would have slept soundly and never mourned for what he had lost.
MY DRIVE TO THE CLIFF.
I am wofully out of humor, and what is worse, out of pocket, and have just been settling a bill for repairs to a buggy which was knocked out of kilter on the Cliff House road the other day. At the present writing I feel that it will be some time before I take the chances of injuring another. The moon may fill her horn and wane again, the seals howl, and the ocean roar, but I will hardly indulge in the luxury of a drive to the beach for many a day to come. I had a couple of ladies with me. Splendid company ladies are—so long as they have unlimited confidence in your skill as a driver. But they try one’s patience after they lose faith, and want to get the lines in their own hands every time you chance to run a wheel into the ditch, or accidentally climb over a pig or calf. Those who were with me on that occasion are not particularly loud in their praise of my driving. The fact is, I didn’t acquit myself in a manner calculated to draw down encomiums in showers upon my head. I drove a span that day. They were called high-strung animals. But I don’t like high-strung horses any more. If they would only run along the track like a locomotive, I could hold the ribbons as gracefully as anybody; but I am very much opposed to all of their little by-plays. This getting scared at a floating thistle-down, or grasshopper swinging on a straw, is something I don’t approve of in a horse. There is no reason in it; no profit accrues from it.
But my trotters were frightened at different objects at the same moment—one at a snail peacefully pursuing his way across the road, and the other at a butterfly winging his wabbling flight along the ditch. At once they became unmanageable, and vied with each other in extravagant antics. From the first the ladies had no very exalted opinion of my manner of handling the lines. Even before we were well under way I had the misfortune to run down a calf. Then a Newfoundland dog thought to stop the buggy by taking hold of one of the hubs, but he made a mis-dive, and shoving his head between the spokes, kept us company for twenty rods without any effort on his part whatever. I also ran over a wheelbarrow loaded with bricks (the Irishman escaped with a crushed hat), and overthrew an apple woman’s stand while turning a corner. I can yet hear ringing in my ear the shouts and execrations of the old vender, when she saw the wheels mounting her baskets and squeezing the cider out of her choicest bellflowers. Until I passed the next street I could look back and see the old lady in her embarrassing situation. There she sat, caught under the broken table, and kicking about wildly in frantic efforts to free herself, while her bonnet was knocked askew by the fall and stuck on one side of her head in the most jaunty position imaginable.