to describe the greatest of all the great _pampero_ storms I have
witnessed. This was when I was in my seventh year.

The wind blowing from this quarter is not like the south-west wind of
the North Atlantic and Britain, a warm wind laden with moisture from
hot tropical seas--that great wind which Joseph Conrad in his _Mirror
of the Sea_ has personified in one of the sublimest passages in recent
literature. It is an excessively violent wind, as all mariners know
who have encountered it on the South Atlantic off the River Plate, but
it is cool and dry, although it frequently comes with great thunder-
clouds and torrents of rain and hail. The rain may last half-an-hour
to half-a-day, but when over the sky is without a vapour and a spell
of fine weather ensues.

It was in sultry summer weather, and towards evening all of us boys
and girls went out for a ramble on the plain, and were about a quarter
of a mile from home when a blackness appeared in the south-west, and
began to cover the sky in that quarter so rapidly that, taking alarm,
we started homewards as fast as we could run. But the stupendous
slaty-black darkness, mixed with yellow clouds of dust, gained on us,
and before we got to the gate the terrified screams of wild birds
reached our ears, and glancing back we saw multitudes of gulls and
plover flying madly before the storm, trying to keep ahead of it. Then
a swarm of big dragon-flies came like a cloud over us, and was gone in
an instant, and just as we reached the gate the first big drops
splashed down in the form of liquid mud. We had hardly got indoors
before the tempest broke in its full fury, a blackness as of night, a
blended uproar of thunder and wind, blinding flashes of lightning, and
torrents of rain. Then as the first thick darkness began to pass away,
we saw that the air was white with falling hailstones of an