remembered what had happened as though it had been years ago.

Now here I have had an experience that I shall not soon forget,
something very precious, and private, and close to my soul; a feeling as
though I had taken the world by surprise, and seen it as it really is
when off its guard--as though I had been quite near to the very core of
things. The quiet holiness of that hour seems all the more mysterious
now, because soon after breakfast yesterday the wind began to blow from
the northwest, and has not left off since, and looking out of the window
I cannot believe that it is the same garden, with the clouds driving
over it in black layers, and angry little showers every now and then
bespattering its harassed and helpless inhabitants, who cannot pull
their roots up out of the ground and run for their lives, as I am sure
they must long to do. How discouraging for a plant to have just proudly
opened its loveliest flowers, the flowers it was dreaming about all the
winter and working at so busily underground during the cold weeks of
spring, and then for a spiteful shower of five minutes' duration to come
and pelt them down, and batter them about, and cover the tender,
delicate things with irremediable splashes of mud! Every bed is already
filled with victims of the gale, and those that escape one shower go
down before the next; so I must make up my mind, I suppose, to the
wholesale destruction of the flowers that had reached perfection--that
head of white rockets among them that washed my face a hundred years
ago--and look forward cheerfully to the development of the younger
generation of buds which cannot yet be harmed.

I know these gales. We get them quite suddenly, always from the north-
west, and always cold. They ruin my garden for a day or two, and in the
summer try my temper, and at all seasons try my skin; yet they are
precious because of the beautiful clear light they bring, the intensity