128 IRature StuMes in Berkshire. 



to refer to this trying side of the outdoor world in 

 summer. The disposition is not strange. We do 

 not like to dwell upon either the faults or the mis- 

 fortunes of our friends. He who loves nature likes 

 to think of her at her best, in her phases of beauty 

 and grace, when she exhilarates or inspires. To tell 

 of her pangs, to paint her in her distresses, to show 

 her in poverty and loss and disaster, seems to savour 

 of disloyalty or indelicacy. Perhaps that is why we 

 hesitate to tell the story of the drought. 



Yet never does human sympathy seem to come 

 so close to nature, never does the heart of man so 

 yearn toward the dumb earth and all that it bears, 

 as when the sun is parching and powdering and 

 cracking the soil, when the heavens refuse their 

 moisture, and when the very air is suffocating with 

 the dust of the field. To-day has been a typical one 

 of all seasons of drought. The sun rose in a dry 

 fog, and all through the forenoon the hills swam in a 

 blue haze which took all the contours and the model- 

 ling out of them, and left them mere flat shades of 

 indigo against the sky. As the sun climbed, a few 

 clouds tried to form ; but they drifted like so many 

 handfuls of ashes into the domed oven of the firma- 

 ment. Far above them, in the remote upper regions 

 of the atmosphere, a few faint wisps of cirrus-cloud 

 lay motionless, all tinged with a reddish glow which 

 seemed like a faint reflection of the seared fields and 

 dusty roads beneath them. Thus these clouds, which 

 usually carry suggestions of shadow, coolness, re- 



