ions--to be always bathed in a rain-cloud. It is quite
impossible, for instance, for me to think of London Bridge save as a
great reeking thoroughfare, slimy with thin mud, with piles of umbrellas
crowding over it, like an army of turtles, and its balustrade steaming
with wet. The charming little Dulwich Gallery, with its Bonningtons and
Murillos, I remember as situated somewhere (for I could never find it
again of my own head) at a very rainy distance from London, under the
spout of an interminable waterfall. The guide-books talk of a pretty
neighborhood, and of a thousand rural charms thereabout; I remember only
one or two draggled policemen in oil-skin capes, and with heads slanted
to the wind, and my cabby, in a four-caped coat, shaking himself like a
water-dog, in the area. Exeter, Gloucester, and Glasgow are three great
wet cities in my memory,--a damp cathedral in each, with a damp-coated
usher to each, who shows damp tombs, and whose talk is dampening to the
last degree. I suppose they have sunshine in these places, and in the
light of the sun I am sure that marvellous gray tower of Gloucester must
make a rare show; but all the reports in the world will not avail to dry
up the image of those wet days of visit.

Considering how very much the fair days are overbalanced by the dirty,
thick, dropping, misty weather of England, I think we take a too sunny
aspect of her history: it has not been under the full-faced smiles of
heaven that her battles, revolutions, executions, and pageants have held
their august procession; the rain has wet many a May-day and many a
harvesting, whose traditional color (through tender English verses) is
gaudy with yellow sunshine. The revellers of the "Midsummer Night's
Dream" would find a wet turf eight days out of ten to disport upon. We
think of Bacon without an umbrella, and of Cromwell without a
mackintosh; yet I suspect both of them carried these, or their
equivalents, pretty constantly. Raleigh, indeed, threw his velvet cloak
into the mud for the Virgin Queen to tread upon,--from which we infer a
recent shower; but it is not often that an historical incident is so
suggestive of the true state of the atmosphere.

History, however, does not mind the rain: agriculture must. More
especially in any view of British agriculture, whether old or new, and
in any estimate of its theories or progress, due consideration must be
had for the generous dampness of the British atmosphere. To this ca