Commonplace Book

'The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking-room watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard, black edges of thunder, ragged, as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment towards the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph, was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling-iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging, as it passed, the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been dropped like a broken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree.'

from The Luck of the Vails by EF Benson (Part IV, Chapter XV)