s in an emergency of
sickness whose expenses he has no money to meet, and the man who, having
no intellectual resources, no self-reliant habit of occupation, finds
himself shut up in the house idle and wretched for a rainy day. I confess
that on rainy mornings in country houses, among well-dressed and so-called
intelligent and Christian people, I have been seized with stronger
disgusts and despairs about the capacity and worth of the average human
creature, than I have ever felt in the worst haunts of ignorant
wickedness.

"What is there to do to-day?" is the question they ask. I know they are
about to ask it before they speak. I have seen it in their listless and
disconcerted eyes at breakfast. It is worse to me than the tolling of a
bell; for saddest dead of all are they who have only a "name to live."

The truth is, there is more to do on a rainy day than on any other. In
addition to all the sweet, needful, possible business of living and
working, and learning and helping, which is for all days, there is the
beauty of the rainy day to see, the music of the rainy day to hear. It
drums on the window-panes, chuckles and gurgles at corners of houses,
tinkles in spouts, makes mysterious crescendoes and arpeggio chords
through the air; and all the while drops from the eaves and upper
window-ledges are beating time as rhythmical and measured as that of a
metronome,--time to which our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful,
inspiriting or saddening, as we will. It is a curious experiment to try
repeating or chanting lines in time and cadence following the patter of
raindrops on windows. It will sometimes be startling in its effect: no
metre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid stroke of the
tender drops,--there seems an uncanny _rapport_ between them at once.

And the beauty of the rain, not even love can find words to tell it. If it
left but one trace, the exquisite shifting sheen of pearls on the outer
side of the window glass, that alone one might watch for a day. In all
times it has been thought worthy of kings, of them who are royally rich,
to have garments sown thick in dainty lines and shapes with fine seed
pearls. Who ever saw any such embroidery which could compare with the
beauty of one pane of glass wrought on a single side with the shining
white transparent globulets of rain? They are millions; they crowd; they
blend; they become a silver stream; they glide slowly down, leaving
tiniest silver