Thenceforth the thunderbolt
ceased to exist, save in poetry, country houses, and the most rural
circles; even the electric fluid was generally relegated to the
provincial press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with
caloric, the devouring element, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, and
many other like philosophical fossils: while lightning itself, shorn of
its former glories, could no longer wage impious war against cathedral
towers, but was compelled to restrict itself to blasting a solitary
rider now and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the
already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand
years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be
shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes
its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric
stone, or a polished axe-head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no
doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in
the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.
HONEY-DEW
Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personae, a couple of small
brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green
'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the
young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft
shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in
search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief
lifetime.
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