THE STORM 



we feel sure it will not strike us. These oaks, fresh 

 from their ordeal of fire, show to the full the glory 

 and terror of storm. One oak it struck on the 

 leader, at first a light touch, just fraying off the 

 lichens. The flash of a lightning instant later, and 

 it wrenched a large branch off the leader, and laid 

 this spoil flat across another and unstruck branch. 

 Then it ripped into the stubborn wood of the 

 trunk, and serpentined, over smooth and knotty 

 places alike, in and out under the armpits of 

 branches, to the ground, to disappear into a little 

 black pit of its own making. 



In another oak, the flame broke up into two 

 streams, which licked the tree on different sides, 

 peeling trunk and branches clean as any bark 

 stripper's tools in sappy April, hurling ruined bits 

 ten, twenty yards, shrivelling the leaves of plants 

 and ferns which grew about the tree. But the 

 particular wood wreckage of the lightning snake 

 lightning the villagers call it is the oak shred 

 and splinter. I gathered shreds seven to ten feet 

 long torn out of the trunk of one oak. Some yet 

 hang in loops and festoons about the stricken trees, 

 others are scattered yards around. There are long, 

 fine shreds so tough and stringy one can tie them 

 in double knots ; other shreds so rough that sharp 

 splinters would enter the hand drawn rapidly along 

 them. These strange fragments are witness of 

 something besides the spite of lightning they 

 show the splendid hardihood of the English oak. 

 An elm might have split to the very heartwood 



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