2 o6 AUGUST 



generation. The myriads appear one hot and heavy 

 morning, and, sure enough, before evening the thunder 

 has broken. They might be bred by the conditions they 

 accompany and have causal connection with the turbu 

 lence they prognosticate. They hatch, in Sir Thomas 

 Browne s phrase, in &quot; the vulgar way/ and coincide by 

 accident, since both flourish round about a late summer 

 date. We see a similar, though much smaller, outcrop 

 of what even men of science name &quot; window flies,&quot; and 

 of these many, as we are well aware, are bred within the 

 house and fly to the light. We know a great deal less 

 of the life history of the thunderflies. Like the seed of a 

 canna, they may need a quite peculiar mingling of damp 

 and heat to complete the change into the winged state ; 

 and this may only be supplied by approaching thunder. 

 The country folk, perhaps, have christened them well. 



The particular frustrated storm of which I write had 

 peculiar features and influences. Looking up at the 

 clouds long before its approach, you saw what unlifted 

 eyes had not noticed, an astonishing multitude of martins 

 and swallows, with a few swifts. They were all at such 

 unusual heights that your eye, like the eye of a camera, 

 saw more and more the longer it was exposed. Some of 

 the birds looked almost as high as a low scud of misty 

 cloud, racing overhead in a film so tenuous that it 

 scarcely obscured the white and restful strata of cloud 

 miles above them. The low cloud was some 800 yards 

 up, the high cloud quite two or three miles. The birds 

 were not careering at that height for nothing, not even 

 for the pleasure of lofty speed. Flies and a few moths, it 

 is said even spiders, so strange is their power of rising 

 on wingless planes, had found like altitudes. Now the 

 rising of the swallows cheers .the country people more 

 certainly than the rising of the mercury in its tube. &quot; It 



