A sombre pine stood up,
black and burned, its heart gaping through a ghastly wound
in the split trunk.
The rain now subsided; there was only an occasional faint
rumbling of thunder, as if it were murmuring over the distant sea;
the clouds broke away in the west; the sun peeped out, as if to see
what had been going on in the world since he hid himself an hour before.
A delicate rainbow bridge stretched from the blackened church
steeple to the glittering weathercock on the squire's barn;
and there, in the centre of the fair green meadows from which it
had risen in glorious strength and beauty for a century or more,
lay the nooning tree.
The fireball, if ball of fire indeed there were, had struck
in the very centre of its splendid dome, and ploughed its way
from feather tip to sturdy root, riving the tree in twain,
cleaving its great boughs left and right, laying one
majestic half level with the earth, and bending the other till
the proud head almost touched the grass.
The rainbow was reflected in the million drops glittering
upon the bowed branches, turning each into a tear of liquid opal.
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