forward--crush! as the iron-shod ram's head hanging from its chains
rushed to the tower. Crush! It sucked back again as if there had been a
vacuum--a moment's silence, and crush! Blow after blow--the floor heaved;
the walls were ready to come together--alternate sucking back and heavy
billowy advance. Crush! crush! Blow after blow, heave and batter and
hoist, as if it would tear the house up by the roots. Forty miles that
battering-ram wind had travelled without so much as a bough to check it
till it struck the house on the hill. Thud! thud! as if it were iron and
not air. I looked from the window, and the bright morning star was
shining--the sky was full of the wind and the star. As light came, the
thud, thud sunk away, and nothing remained but the whoo-hoo-hoo of the
keyhole and the moan of the chimney. These did not leave us; for four
days and nights the whoo-hoo-hoo-whoo never ceased a moment. Whoo-hoo!
whoo! and this is the wind on the hill indoors.

Out of doors, sometimes in the morning, deep in the valley, over the
tree-tops of the forest, there stays a vapour, lit up within by sunlight.
A glory hovers over the oaks--a cloud of light hundreds of feet thick,
the air made visible by surcharge and heaviness of sunbeams, pressed
together till you can see them in themselves and not reflected. The cloud
slants down the sloping wood, till in a moment it is gone, and the beams
are now focussed in the depth of the narrow valley. The mirror has been
tilted, and the glow has shifted; in a moment more it has vanished into
space, and the dream has gone from the wood. In the arms of the wind,
vast bundles of mist are borne against the hill; they widen and slip, and
lengthen, drawing out; the wind works quickly with moist colours ready
and a wide brush laying broadly. Colour comes up in the wind; the thin
mist disappears, drunk up in the grass and trees, and the air is full of
blue behind the vapour. Blue sky at the far horizon--rich deep blue
overhead--a dark-brown blue deep yonder in the gorge among the trees. I