No feature of Nature's storehouse, it may be said, is so full of grandeur and expectancy as a storm in the forest. A scourge, maybe, but not in the sense of punishment, but of playfulness and reviving life! A carnival of the air, a frolicking of the atoms, where moderation gives place to fantasies and all the world joins in the fullness of life! Many, I know, do not look upon such things with any pleasure, but for the most part all such are city born, and not used to wide expanses where the wind is free to work its will, nor cumbered about with the devices of men that serve to stay its strength and hinder its progress. To such, storms are fraught with direful happenings, in which the wind and lightning are dreaded agents; but not so do those who are country bred look upon the tempest. Nor did I, but lay with upturned face, harkening to each sound as if it conveyed some form of speech, which I have no doubt it did.
In a little while, and as couriers might carry the news, flashes of lightning shone through the trees and spun out across the open sky until presently the wide expanse of heaven was ablaze with the reflected light. Counting from these to the thunder that followed, I kept track in idle curiosity of the storm as it approached. Nor was it long delayed, but came on, preceded by flurries of rain, which the wind, catching up, whipped into shreds of mist and spray. At last, as if satisfied with the preparation made for its coming, the storm burst, and not lightly, as it sometimes does, but deluging the earth with water and overspreading the sky with masses of phosphorescent light and deep reverberating thunder. Rising to my feet, I sought shelter behind the great tree, harkening to the wild roar of the tempest as it swept past, echoing and reëchoing through the forest like the beating of the ocean on some rockbound coast. In the midst of this, and confusing, a sound as of booming cannon caught my ear. Listening, I thought it the cry of a wild beast, but in a moment, catching the direction more clearly, found it came from the hollow of the great tree beside which I stood. Thus the night wore on, the rain after a while dying away, but the wind, as if in recompense, increasing each moment in violence, its wild shrieking and the mad rush of the trees as they bent this way and that rising and falling like no sound that man can describe or imitate. For in such things Nature claims its sole prerogative, and strive as we may, we cannot in any way mimic its voices or varying moods.