thin reach. Our
best rains are heard mostly on roofs, and winds in chimneys; and when by
choice or compulsion we are pushed into the heart of a storm, the
confusion made by cumbersome equipments and nervous haste and mean fear,
prevent our hearing any other than the loudest expressions. Yet we may
draw enjoyment from storm sounds that are beyond hearing, and storm
movements we cannot see. The sublime whirl of planets around their suns
is as silent as raindrops oozing in the dark among the roots of plants.
In this great storm, as in every other, there were tones and gestures
inexpressibly gentle manifested in the midst of what is called violence
and fury, but easily recognized by all who look and listen for them. The
rain brought out the colors of the woods with delightful freshness, the
rich brown of the bark of the trees and the fallen burs and leaves and
dead ferns; the grays of rocks and lichens; the light purple of swelling
buds, and the warm yellow greens of the libocedrus and mosses. The air
was steaming with delightful fragrance, not rising and wafting past in
separate masses, but diffused through all the atmosphere. Pine woods are
always fragrant, but most so in spring when the young tassels are
opening and in warm weather when the various gums and balsams are
softened by the sun. The wind was now chafing their innumerable needles
and the warm rain was steeping them. Monardella grows here in large beds
in the openings, and there is plenty of laurel in dells and manzanita on
the hillsides, and the rosy, fragrant chamoebatia carpets the ground
almost everywhere. These, with the gums and balsams of the woods, form
the main local fragrance-fountains of the storm. The ascending clouds of
aroma wind-rolled and rain-washed became pure like light and traveled
with the wind as part of it. Toward the middle of the afternoon the main
flood cloud lifted along its western border revealing a beautiful
section of the Sacramento Valley some twenty or thirty miles away,
brilliantly sun-lighted and glistering with rain-sheets as if paved with
silver. Soon afterward a jagged bluff-like cloud with a sheer face
appeared over the valley of the Yuba, dark-colored and roughened with
numerous furrows like some huge lava-table. The blue Coast Range was
seen stretching along the sky like a beveled wall, and the somber,
craggy Marysville Buttes rose impressively out of the flooded plain like
islands out of the sea. Then the rain began to aba