We are nearly into June. Would you recognise our normal weather pattern from this effusion by an Irish writer? "Once more had come the miracle of the Irish June. Yellow of gorse; red of clover; purple of the Dublin mountains. Everywhere the white of the hawthorn - there would be a hard winter coming, the gloomy farmers said, so much of it there was. And wherever a clump of trees was, there grew great crops of bluebells. And the primroses lingered, who should have been gone three weeks and more . . . And where there were dock leaves by the roadside the golden snail crept, with his long sensitive eyes, his little house on his back - sheleg-a-bookie Irish children call him affectionately, snail of the hump, the golden snail with his mottled house, who leaves a band of silver on the green leaf.
"Once more now had come the miracle of the Irish June. Westward the sun drove, like some majestic bird, and the rays, yellow as yellow wine, cleared the purple peaks and slopes . . . But in the valleys and lowlands, the foggy dew still rested, so that the kine and horses were breast deep in it, as in a sea of silver . . . All the population of the trees was busy. There sounded the passionate note of the wood dove. The cheery blackbird sang and the thrush whistled. There arose the little piping of the finches. The lark mounted into the high air, and the kingfisher skimmed the river in search of the golden speckled trout.
"Once more now had come the miracle of the Irish June . . . Somewhere south she had come, out of some secret hiding place in Africa, and coming high over the Mediterranean she had touched the harsh highlands of Spain, and smiling on France, she had come straight as a pigeon to her kingdom. All the trees nodded to her, all the flowers waved, the rivers sang and the salmon leaped high from his pool. The little people of the hills and the strange creatures of the mist yielded her precedence, retiring some secret whither . . . the little cobbling leprechauns, who own, each of them a crock of gold, the Naked Hangman with his gibbet, and the great horse-like Pooka, snorting fire, who covers Ireland in three bounds.
"All these were doing her reverence . . . so that the poacher of the hills, and the fisherman of Aran and the peasant tilling his acre, stopped for a moment to say: `God is good! Once more now has come the miracle of the Irish June'." From the opening pages of Hangman's House by Donn Byrne, a popular novelist in the 1920s.