The Ned M'Keown Stories: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume ThreeCarleton, William
General
The Ned M'Keown Stories: Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of; William Carleton, Volume Three
Carleton, William
Ireland -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
“From this moment the storm became progressive in dreadful magnitude,
and the thunder, in concomitance with the most vivid flashes of
lightning, pealed through the sky, with an awful grandeur and
magnificence, that were exalted and even rendered more sublime by
the still solemnity of religious worship. Every heart now prayed
fervently--every spirit shrunk into a deep sense of its own guilt and
helplessness--and every conscience was terror-stricken, as the voice of
an angry God thundered out of his temple of storms though the heavens;
for truly, as the Authorized Version has it, 'darkness was under his
feet, and his pavilion round about was dark waters, and thick clouds of
the skies, because he was wroth.'
“The rain now condescended in even-down torrents, and thunder succeeded
thunder in deep and terrific peals, whilst the roar of the gigantic
echoes that deepened and reverberated among the glens and hollows,
'laughing in their mountain mirth,'--hard fortune to me, but they made
the flesh creep on my bones!
“This lasted for an hour, when the thunder slackened: but the rain still
continued. As soon as mass was over, and the storm had elapsed, except
an odd peal which might be heard rolling at a distance behind the hills,
the people began gradually to repover their spirits, and enter into
confabulation; but to venture out was still impracticable. For
about another hour it rained incessantly, after which it ceased; the
hemisphere became lighter--and the sun shone out once more upon the
countenance of nature with its former brightness. The congregation then
decanted itself out of the chapel--the spirits of the people dancing
with that remarkable buoyancy or juvenility which is felt after a
thunderstorm, when the air is calm, soople, and balmy--and all nature
garmented with glittering verdure and light. The crowd next began to
commingle on their way home, and to make the usual observations upon the
extraordinary storm which had just passed, and the probable effect it
would produce on the fruit and agriculture of the neighborhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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