Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/214

 terrifick warning—one flash of lightning succeeding another in most rapid succession, so that the woods frequently appeared as in a flame, and several trees were struck in every direction around me, one being shattered within fifty paces on my right, while the thunder without intermission of an instant was heard in every variety of {184} sound, from the deafening burst, shaking the whole surrounding atmosphere to the long solemn cadence always interrupted by a new and more heavy peal before it had reached its pause. This elemental war would have been sublimely awful to me, had I been in an open country, but the frequent crash of the falling bolts on the surrounding trees, gave me such incessant warnings of danger, that the sublimity was lost in the awe. I had been accustomed to thunder storms in every climate, and I had heard the roar of sixty ships of the line in battle, but I never before was witness to so tremenduous an elemental uproar. I suppose the heaviest part of the electrick cloud was impelled upon the very spot I was passing.

I walked the five miles within an hour, but my speed did not avail me to escape a torrent of rain which fell during the last mile, so that long before I arrived at the hospitable dwelling of the Pennsylvania hunter who occupied the next cabin, I was drenched and soaked most completely. I might have sheltered myself from some of the storm under the lee side of a tree, had not the wind, which blew a hurricane, varied every instant—but independent of that, I preferred moving along the road to prevent a sudden chill; besides, every tree being a conductor, there is greater danger near the trunk of one, than in keeping in a road, however narrow, which has been marked by the trees having been cut down.

My host and his family had come here from the back part of Pennsylvania only last May, and he had already a fine field of corn and a good deal of hay. He had hitherto