t like sharpshooters in the trenches; as
though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant we should enter a
zone of danger. So we lay quietly on our backs and stared at the
heavens.

The first impression thence given was of stars sailing serene and
unaffected, remote from the turbulence of what until this instant had
seemed to fill the universe. They were as always, just as we should
see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads chirped clearly
audible at half a mile. The importance of the tempest shrank. Then
below them next we noticed the mountains; they too were serene and calm.

Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucination; something
not objective; something real, but within the soul of him who looked
upon it. It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days when
nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant sun, shines with
superlative brilliancy. Emotions of a power to shake the foundations
of life seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow symbols.
For after all, we were contented at heart and tranquil in mind, and
this was but the outer gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience
we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves responded to it
automatically. We became excited, keyed to a high tension, and so lay
rigid on our backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls.

It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses that perforce
automatically our experience had to conclude it psychical. We were in
air absolutely still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and
turned and bent and struck back, evidently in the power of a mighty
force. Across the calm heavens the murk of flying atmosphere--I have
always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could SEE the
wind--the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the
air;--these faintly hinted at intense movement rushing down through
space. A roar of sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasionally it
intermitted, falling abruptly in volume like the mysterious rare
hushings of a rapid stream. Then the familiar noises of a summer night
became audible for the briefest instant,--a horse sneezed, an owl
hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind. And with a howl the
legions of good and evil took up their warring. It was too real, and
yet it was not reconcilable with the calm of our resting-places.

For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and
str