is reached.

The average rainfall is about fifty or fifty-five inches in the
Willamette Valley, and along the coast seventy-five inches, or even more
at some points--figures that bring many a dreary night and day to mind,
however fine the effect on the great evergreen woods and the fields of
the farmers. The rainy season begins in September or October and lasts
until April or May. Then the whole country is solemnly soaked and
poulticed with the gray, streaming clouds and fogs, night and day, with
marvelous constancy. Towards the beginning and end of the season a good
many bright days occur to break the pouring gloom, but whole months of
rain, continuous, or nearly so, are not at all rare. Astronomers beneath
these Oregon skies would have a dull time of it. Of all the year only
about one fourth of the days are clear, while three fourths have more or
less of fogs, clouds, or rain.

The fogs occur mostly in the fall and spring. They are grand,
far-reaching affairs of two kinds, the black and the white, some of the
latter being very beautiful, and the infinite delicacy and tenderness
of their touch as they linger to caress the tall evergreens is most
exquisite. On farms and highways and in the streets of towns, where
work has to be done, there is nothing picturesque or attractive in any
obvious way about the gray, serious-faced rainstorms. Mud abounds. The
rain seems dismal and heedless and gets in everybody's way. Every
face is turned from it, and it has but few friends who recognize its
boundless beneficence. But back in the untrodden woods where no axe has
been lifted, where a deep, rich carpet of brown and golden mosses covers
all the ground like a garment, pressing warmly about the feet of the
trees and rising in thick folds softly and kindly over every fallen
trunk, leaving no spot naked or uncared-for, there the rain is welcomed,
and every drop that falls finds a place and use as sweet and pure as
itself. An excursion into the woods when the rain harvest is at its
height is a noble pleasure, and may be safely enjoyed at small expense,
though very few care to seek it. Shelter is easily found beneath the
great trees in some hollow out of the wind, and one need carry but
little provision, none at all of a kind that a wetting would spoil. The
colors of the woods are then at their best, and the mighty hosts of the
forest, every needle tingling in the blast, wave and sing in glorious
harmony.

"'T were worth ten year