Sheaves by E.F. Benson — Read

Hugh was standing at the dining-room window of the Chalkpits at Mannington, opening letters, and looking with slightly pained wonder at the hopelessness of the morning. A south-westerly gale had set in last night, and through the hours of darkness it had increased to a hurricane, and though any reasonable gale might have been expected to blow itself out in this time, or anyhow to show signs of tiring, this particular one seemed merely to have blown itself in, just as it had blown in the window of his dressing-room half an hour ago. Outside the garden was cowering beneath these blasts, and the scuds of driving rain that crossed the water-meadow beyond like clouds of driven smoke, blotting out the landscape, flung themselves against the streaming panes.

The terrace walk, that last night had been so neat and orderly, was now but a series of pools of wind-ruffled water, dotted over by twigs and branches torn from the tortured trees, and early seedlings that yesterday had shown so brave an upstanding were now but a little plaster of tiny stem and infinitesimal leaf embedded in mud. Creepers had been torn from the wall, leaves battered from them, and the Japanese cherry-tree at the end that had been a cascade of pink frothing blossom was now gaunt and bare. It seemed curious that the laws of Nature demanded so hysterical an outburst.