THE GREAT CLOUD DRIVE. 



IN the New England lumber country the spring 

 freshets bring down the harvest of logs which 

 the wood-choppers have reaped with their 

 axes. I judge it to be a most impressive and ex- 

 hilarating sight v^hen the streams are choked, and 

 the waters fight and foam to make their way, and 

 the rivers run almost solid with the crowding tilth 

 o[ the forests. I never saw the spectacle. But 

 somehow the term by which it is called — a " drive " 

 of logs, — has been running in my head all this sum- 

 mer, as I have watched the great cloud drive which 

 has filled the air, and choked the channels of the 

 firmament, and surged through space for one whole 

 month and more by the calendar, till we who looked 

 grew dizzy, and the eye fairly ached with the move- 

 ment of the swift and shifting procession. 



The drive began with the great rain that filled all 

 the streams, and caused a midsummer freshet, and 

 Hooded acres on acres of tilled land and mowing-tlelds. 

 As the storm came on, the sky filed with leaden-grey 

 clouds, through whose lowTr tiers one could see a 

 second and a third layer, forming what John Bur- 

 roughs so neatly characterises as '^ three-ply '' clouds, 



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