Some of the Sights Willie saw. 109

 

and the West were answering each other with alter.
nate flashes of forked lightning that seemed to split
the black clouds with cracks of blinding blue, awful
in their blasting silence—followed by great, billowy,
shattering rolls of thunder, as loud as if the sky had
been a huge kettledrum, on which the clubs of
giant drummers were beating a terrible onset ; while
at sudden intervals, down came the big-dropped
rain, pattering to the earth as if beaten out of the
clouds by the blows of the thunder. But Willie
was not frightened, though the lightning blinded
and the thunder deafened him—not frightened any
more than the tiniest flower in the garden below,
which, if she could have thought about it, would
have thought it all being done only that she might
feel cooler and stronger, and be able to hold up her
head better.

And once he saw a glorious dance of the aurora
borealis—in all the colours of a faint rainbow. The
frosty snow sparkled underneath, and the cold stars
of winter sparkled above, and between the snow
and the stars, shimmered and shifted, vanished and
came again, a serried host of spears. Willie had
been reading the “ Paradise Lost,” and the part which
pleased him, boy-like, the most, was the wars of the
angels in the sixth book. Hence it came that the
aurora looked to him like the crowding of innu-
merable spears—in the hands of angels, themselves
invisible — clashed together and shaken asunder,