Before it was fairly
upon them, Lucy, herself pale with terror, had collected her children in a
darkened room and seated them all on a feather-bed, where they remained
during the storm, half stifled by the heat, the little ones clinging to
their mother, hiding their heads in her lap and crying with fear.
Elsie and her children formed a different group; the mother the central
figure here also, her darlings gathered closely about her, in her
dressing-room--at a safe distance from the open windows--watching with
awed delight, the bursting of the storm clouds over the mountain-tops, the
play of the lightning, the sweep of the rain down from the heights into
the valleys and river below, listening to the crash and roar of the
thunder as it reverberated among the hills, one echo taking it up after
another, and repeating it to the next, till it sounded like the
explosions of many batteries of heavy artillery, now near at hand, now
farther and farther away.
"Mamma, isn't it grand?" exclaimed Eddie, in one of the brief pauses in
the wild uproar of the elements.
"Yes," she said, "the thunder of his power who can understand?"
"Is it God, mamma? does God make it?" asked little Herbert.
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