Explore "The Crooked Stick" by Rolf Boldrewood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During the half hour bestowed on lunch the weather apparently devoted itself to falsifying Mrs. Devereux's prediction, and raising Pollie to the position of a prophetess. It is a curious fact that in Australia few people are weather-wise. No one can tell, for instance, with any certainty, when it will rain. No one can say with precision when it will not rain. All other forms of weather, be it understood, are immaterial. Rain means everything -- peace, plenty, prosperity, the potentiality of boundless wealth; the want of it losses and crosses, sin, suffering, and starvation. For nearly two years the hearts of the dwellers in that vast pastoral region had been made sick with hope deferred. Now, without warning, with no particular indication of change from the long, warm days and still, cloudless nights that seemed as if they would never end, that earth would gradually become desiccated into a grave of all living creatures, suddenly it commenced to rain as if to reproduce the Noachian deluge.
The larger creeks bore a turgid tide, level with their banks, on the surface of which tree-stems and branches, with differing samples of _debris_, whirled floating down.