hen, with a
murmurous coo about the weather showing no signs of clearing up, he
took a hand. Constant dropping--and it was much worse than
dropping--will wear away a stone, and it is my belief if it had gone on
much longer his reverence would have played on Sunday.

The spectacle that the roads of the district present at such a time is
most melancholy. Everyone is in a closed car--a cross between a bathing
machine and that convenient vehicle which carries both corpse and
mourners; all the windows seem made of bottle glass, a phenomenon
produced by the flattening of the noses of imprisoned tourists; and
nothing shines except an occasional traveller in oilskin. In such
seasons, indeed, oilskin (lined with patience) is your only wear.
Ordinary waterproofs in such a climate become mere blotting paper, and
with the best of them, without leggings and headgear to match, the poor
Londoner might, I do not say just as well be in London (for that is his
aspiration all day long), but just as well go to bed at once, and stop
there. 'But why does he not go home?' it may be asked: a question to
which there are several answers. In the first place (for one must take
the average in such cases) because he is a fool. Secondly, like the
rest of the well-to-do world, he has suffered the summer, wherein
warmth and sunshine are really to be had, to slip by, and has only the
fag end of it in which to take holiday. It is now or never--or at all
events now or next year--with him. All his friends, too, are out of
town, flattening _their_ noses against window panes; his club is under
repair, his house in brown holland, his servants on board wages. Like
the young gentleman in Locksley Hall, he is so absolutely at the end of
his resources, that an 'angry fancy' is all that is left to him. Of
course, under its influence he sits down and writes to the _Times_;
but, if the humblest of its correspondents may venture to say so
without offence, even that does not help him much. That suicides
increase in wet autumns is notorious; but that murders should in these
sequestered vales maintain the even tenor of their way is a feather in
the cap of human nature. In lodgings, where the pent-up tourist has no
one but his wife and family to speak to, where Dick and Tom _will_ romp
in his only sitting-room, and Eliza Jane practises all day on the crazy
piano, this forbearance is especially creditable.

Even in hotels, however, there is great temptation. On the
nort