In The
Midst Of The Clangour The Hearing Settled Down To The Sighing Of The
Pines, Which Drew The Mind Towards It, And Soothed The Senses To Sleep.
Towards dawn, awake again - another change:
The battering-ram at work now
against the walls. Swinging back, the solid thickness of the wind came
forward - crush! as the iron-shod ram's head hanging from its chains
rushed to the tower. Crush! It sucked back again as if there had been a
vacuum - a moment's silence, and crush! Blow after blow - the floor heaved;
the walls were ready to come together - alternate sucking back and heavy
billowy advance. Crush! crush! Blow after blow, heave and batter and
hoist, as if it would tear the house up by the roots. Forty miles that
battering-ram wind had travelled without so much as a bough to check it
till it struck the house on the hill. Thud! thud! as if it were iron and
not air. I looked from the window, and the bright morning star was
shining - the sky was full of the wind and the star. As light came, the
thud, thud sunk away, and nothing remained but the whoo-hoo-hoo of the
keyhole and the moan of the chimney. These did not leave us; for four
days and nights the whoo-hoo-hoo-whoo never ceased a moment. Whoo-hoo!
whoo! and this is the wind on the hill indoors.
Out of doors, sometimes in the morning, deep in the valley, over the
tree-tops of the forest, there stays a vapour, lit up within by sunlight.
A glory hovers over the oaks - a cloud of light hundreds of feet thick,
the air made visible by surcharge and heaviness of sunbeams, pressed
together till you can see them in themselves and not reflected.
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