tresses, and stars, and tangles, and laced sprays of the miniature growth
of the springs and running brooks were as bright as malachite, though
embedded in a double line of dead white shivering sedge. And thus the
shortest day went by, and still the fields lay dry, and the river shrank,
and the fish were off the feed; and though murky vapours hung over the
river and the flats and shut out the sun, the long-expected rains fell not
until the last week's end of the year. Then at last signs and tokens began
by which the knowing ones prophesied that there was something the matter
with the weather. The sheep fed as if they were not to have another bite
for a week, and bleated without ceasing, strange birds flew across the sky
in hurrying flocks, and in all the country houses and farmers' halls the
old-fashioned barometers, with their dials almost as big as our eight-day
clocks and pointers as long as a knitting-needle, began to fall, or rather
to go backwards, further than was ever recorded. And whereas it is, and
always has been, a fact well known to the owners of these barometers that
if they are tapped violently in the centre of their mahogany stomachs the
needle will jerk a little in the direction of recovery, and is thereby
believed to exercise a controlling influence in the direction of better
weather, the more the barometers were tapped and thumped the more the
needle edged backwards, till in some cases it went down till it pointed to
the ivory star at the very bottom of the dial, and then struck work and
stuck there.

[Illustration: WILD DUCK. _From a photograph by Charles Reid._]

[Illustration: A FULL THAMES. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co._]

That night the storm began. To connoisseurs in weather in the
meteorological sense it was a joy and an ensample, for it was a perfect
cyclonic storm, exactly the right shape, with all its little dotted lines