The day had opened with a restless picturesque morning of gusty sunshine
and rolling clouds. There was something rich and stormy and ominous in
the air, and a soft rainy sense of solemn impending change, at once
brilliant and mournful; a curious sense of intermingled death and birth,
as of withered leaves and dreaming seeds being blown about together on
their errands of decay and resurrection by the same breath of the unseen
creative spirit. Incidentally it meant a rain-storm by evening, and its
mysterious presage had prompted Colin to the furnishing of our knapsacks
with water-proof cloaks, which, as the afternoon wore on, seemed more and
more a wise provision. But the rain still held off, contenting itself
with threatening phantasmagoria of cloud, moulding and massing like
visible thunder in our wake. It seemed leisurely certain, however, of
catching us before nightfall; and, sure enough, as the light began to
thicken, and we stood admiring its mountainous magnificence--vast billows
of plum-coloured gloom, hanging like doomsday over a stretch of haunted
orchard--the great drops began to patter down.

Surely the sky is the greatest of all melodramatists. Nothing short of
the cataclysmal end of the world could have provided drama to match the
stupendous stage-setting of that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and
wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in
that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it the landscape seemed to grow
livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees and
grasses. Oedipus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could hardly
have accounted for that angry sky. Such a sky it must have been that
carried doom to the cities of the plain. And, after all, it was only
Colin and I innocently making haste to Dutch Hollow!

That Teutonic spot seemed hopelessly far away as the rain began to drive
down and the horizon to open here and there in lurid slashings of stormy