Storms are fine speakers, and tell all they know, but their voices of lightning, torrent, and rushing wind are much less numerous than the nameless still, small voices too low for human ears; and because we are poor listeners we fail to catch much that is fairly within reach.  Our best rains are heard mostly on roofs, and winds in chimneys; and when by choice or compulsion we are pushed into the heart of a storm, the confusion made by cumbersome equipments and nervous haste and mean fear, prevent our hearing any other than the loudest expressions.  Yet we may draw enjoyment from storm sounds that are beyond hearing, and storm movements we cannot see.  The sublime whirl of planets around their suns is as silent as raindrops oozing in the dark among the roots of plants.  In this great storm, as in every other, there were tones and gestures inexpressibly gentle manifested in the midst of what is called violence and fury, but easily recognized by all who look and listen for them.  The rain brought out the colors of the woods with delightful freshness, the rich brown of the bark of the trees and the fallen burs and leaves and dead ferns; the grays of rocks and lichens; the light purple of swelling buds, and the warm yellow greens of the libocedrus and mosses.  The air was steaming with delightful fragrance, not rising and wafting past in separate masses, but diffused through all the atmosphere.  Pine woods are always fragrant, but most so in spring when the young tassels are opening and in warm weather when the various gums and balsams are softened by the sun.  The wind was now chafing their innumerable needles and the warm rain was steeping them.  Monardella grows here in large beds in the openings, and there is plenty of laurel in dells and manzanita on the hillsides, and the rosy, fragrant chamoebatia carpets the ground almost everywhere.  These, with the gums and balsams of the woods, form the main local fragrance-fountains of the storm.  The ascending clouds of aroma wind-rolled and rain-washed became pure like light and traveled with the wind as part of it.  Toward the middle of the afternoon the main flood cloud lifted along its western border revealing a beautiful section of the Sacramento Valley some twenty or thirty miles away, brilliantly sun-lighted and glistering with rain-sheets as if paved with silver.  Soon afterward a jagged bluff-like cloud with a sheer face appeared over the valley of the Yuba, dark-colored and roughened with numerous furrows like some huge lava-table.  The blue Coast Range was seen stretching along the sky like a beveled wall, and the somber, craggy Marysville Buttes rose impressively out of the flooded plain like islands out of the sea.  Then the rain began to abate and I sauntered down through the dripping bushes reveling in the universal vigor and freshness that inspired all the life about me.  How clean and unworn and immortal the woods seemed to be!—­the lofty cedars in full bloom laden with golden pollen and their washed plumes shining; the pines rocking