‘We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been here lately,’ said Claude. ‘Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that is a non sequitur.’ ‘“I am no more a non sequitur than you are,” answered the Cornish magistrate to the barrister.’ ‘Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of men somewhat more quickly than we see them, fear sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the fault is in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has spoilt many a good day’s fishing. Ah, no! there is the cause; the hat of a mightier than you—the thunder-spirit himself. Thor is at hand, while the breeze, awe-stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handkerchief of mist.’ ‘Oh, profane and uncomely simile!—which will next, I presume, liken the coming hailstorm to hair-powder shaken from the said wig.’ ‘To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to yonder pile of crags, and thank your stars that there is one at hand; for these mountain tornadoes are at once Tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in their cutting cold.’ Down it came. The brown hills vanished in white sheets of hail, first falling perpendicularly, then slanting and driving furiously before the cold blast which issued from the storm. The rock above us rang with the thunder-peals; and the lightning, which might have fallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive into the glittering river at our feet. We sat silent some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more mighty than ourselves; and it was long after the uproar had rolled away among the hills, and a steady, sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low grey fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the crisp heather, that I turned to Claude.