APPENDIX.
WEATHER FOR USE IN THIS BOOK.
Selected from the Best Authorities.
A brief though violent thunderstorm which had raged over the city waspassing away; but still, though the rain had ceased more than an hourbefore, wild piles of dark and coppery clouds, in which a fierce andrayless glow was laboring, gigantically overhung the grotesque andhuddled vista of dwarf houses, while in the distance, sheeting high overthe low, misty confusion of gables and chimneys, spread a pall of dead,leprous blue, suffused with blotches of dull, glistening yellow, andwith black plague-spots of vapor floating and faint lightnings crinklingon its surface. Thunder, still muttering in the close and sultry air,kept the scared dwellers in the street within, behind their closedshutters; and all deserted, cowed, dejected, squalid, like poor, stupid,top-heavy things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest, stoodthe drenched structures on either side of the narrow and crooked way,ghastly and picturesque, under the giant canopy. Rain dripped wretchedlyin slow drops of melancholy sound from their projecting eaves upon thebroken flagging, lay there in pools or trickled into the swollen drains,where the fallen torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river. "TheBrazen Android."-W. D. O'Connor.
The fiery mid-March sun a moment hung Above the bleak Judean wilderness; Then darkness swept upon us, and 't was night.
"Easter-Eve at Kerak-Moab." --Clinton Scollard.
The quick-coming winter twilight was already at hand. Snow was againfalling, sifting delicately down, incidentally as it were. "Felicia."--Fanny N. D. Murfree.
Merciful heavens! The whole west, from right to left, blazes up witha fierce light, and next instant the earth reels and quivers with theawful shock of ten thousand batteries of artillery. It is the signalfor the Fury to spring--for a thousand demons to scream and shriek--forinnumerable serpents of fire to writhe and light up the blackness.
Now the rain falls--now the wind is let loose with a terribleshriek--now the lightning is so constant that the eyes burn, andthe thunder-claps merge into an awful roar, as did the 800 cannon atGettysburg. Crash! Crash! Crash! It is the cottonwood trees falling toearth. Shriek! Shriek! Shriek! It is the Demon racing along the plainand uprooting even the blades of grass. Shock! Shock! Shock! It is theFury flinging his fiery bolts into the bosom of the earth.-- "The Demonand the Fury."--M. Quad.
Away up the gorge all diurnal fancies trooped into the wide libertiesof endless luminous vistas of azure sunlit mountains beneath the shiningazure heavens. The sky, looking down in deep blue placidities, only hereand there smote the water to azure emulations of its tint.-- "In thePeople's Country." Charles Egbert Craddock.
There was every indication of a dust-storm, though the sun still shonebrilliantly. The hot wind had become wild and rampant. It was whippingup the sandy coating of the plain in every direction. High in the airwere seen whirling spires and cones of sand--a curious effect againstthe deep-blue sky. Below, puffs of sand were breaking out of the plainin every direction, as though the plain were alive with invisiblehorsemen. These sandy cloudlets were instantly dissipated by the wind;it was the larger clouds that were lifted whole into the air, and thelarger clouds of sand were becoming more and more the rule.
Alfred's eye, quickly scanning the horizon, descried the roof of theboundary-rider's hut still gleaming in the sunlight. He remembered thehut well. It could not be farther than four miles, if as much as that,from this point of the track. He also knew these dust-storms of old;Bindarra was notorious for them: Without thinking twice, Alfred putspurs to his horse and headed for the hut. Before he had ridden halfthe distance the detached clouds of sand banded together in one densewhirlwind, and it was only owing to his horse's instinct that he did notride wide of the hut altogether; for during the last half-mile he neversaw the hut, until its outline loomed suddenly over his horse's ears;and by then the sun was invisible.--"A Bride from the Bush."
It rained forty days and forty nights.--Genesis.
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