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I had often talked the matter over with George Artlett, and now we drifted into the old subject. But he was never to be cajoled out of his belief in the miraculous nature of the affair.

‘Him as sent th’ fire down to th’ could altar,’ he said, his long arm going up to heaven, and his voice taking on that deep, vibratory chime so familiar to Sunday loiterers in Stavisham marketplace, ‘He knaws how to send watter to faith an’ a dry pan. Ay! but I ha’ seed it comin’, many’s the time. An’ th’ first time, I ’lowed as ’twur High Barn ricks burnin’. We was goin’ hoame to fold, and there afore me, right agen th’ red night-sky, I seed a gurt topplin’ cloud o’ summut as looked like smoke ahent th’ hill. Sez I, ’tis High Barn ricks afire! But it warn’t. It wur jest Gorramighty gatherin’ together His dew from the fower winds o’ heaven, an’ pourin’ it into Maast’ Coles’s pond.’

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One afternoon, when the month was all but at its end, I came home through the riverside meadows. The sun had just dipped below the misty earth-line. Before me, in the east, the darkness was spreading up the sky, and the larger stars already shone with something of their nightly lustre. But behind me it was still day. From the horizon upward, and far overhead, the sky was a pale, luminous turquoise, overflecked with cloud of fiery amber—the two colours a perfect harmony of cold and heat. As I trod the narrow field-path, facing the dusk, with all that glorious enmity reconciled at my back, I became aware of a mysterious sound somewhere in the chain of tree-girt meadows on ahead. A missel-thrush had been singing hard by, but now his clarion had ceased, and this other far-away note forced me suddenly out of my musing. It was not a single song, but a deep, continuous outpouring, a medley of music like the splashing and tumbling of mountain brooks. With every step forward it grew in volume. At last, in a belt of elm-trees that bordered one of the farthest fields, I came upon the cause of it; and though I had many times seen vast congregations of starlings, I had never before encountered so huge a company as now met my gaze.