deliciousness of water to a parched tongue. The office of the
sunshine is slow, subtle, occult, unsuspected; but when the
clouds do their work, the benefaction is so palpable and copious,
so direct and wholesale, that all creatures take note of it, and
for the most part rejoice in it. It is a completion, a
consummation, a paying of a debt with a royal hand; the measure is
heaped and overflowing. It was the simple vapor of water that the
clouds borrowed of the earth; now they pay back more than water:
the drops are charged with electricity and with the gases of the
air, and have new solvent powers. Then, how the slate is sponged
off, and left all clean and new again!

In the shed where I was sheltered were many relics and odds and
ends of the farm. In juxtaposition with two of the most stalwart
wagon or truck wheels I ever looked upon was a cradle of ancient
and peculiar make,--an aristocratic cradle, with high-turned posts
and an elaborately carved and moulded body, that was suspended upon
rods and swung from the top. How I should have liked to hear its
history and the story of the lives it had rocked, as the rain sang
and the boughs tossed without! Above it was the cradle of a phœbe-
bird saddled upon a stick that ran behind the rafter; its occupants
had not flown, and its story was easy to read.

Soon after the first shock of the storm was over, and before I
could see breaking sky, the birds tuned up with new ardor,--the
robin, the indigo-bird, the purple finch, the song sparrow, and in
the meadow below the bobolink. The cockerel near me followed suit,
and repeated his refrain till my meditations were so disturbed that
I was compelled to eject him from the cover, albeit he had the best
right there. But he crowed his defiance with drooping tail from the