These showers, however, seemed, as Borrow remarked, merely to give a rich
colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on
the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain
summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Borrow's special delight.
He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous,
shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As
we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird
yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that
in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over
Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops
sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far
away. Borrow told us some interesting stories of Romany superstitions in
connection with the rainbow--how, by making a "trus'hul" (cross) of two
sticks, the Romany chi who "pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of
the sky," etc. Whereupon Hake, quite as original a man as Borrow, and a
humourist of a still rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and
whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the
"Spirit of the Rainbow" which a certain child went out to find.

Borrow loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found
also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with
every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to
shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I
began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant
striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true "Child of
the Open Air."

"Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella
that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?" I murmured to Hake, while
Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said, in a
dreamy way, "Old England! Old England!"

VIII. A CHILD OF THE OPEN AIR UNDER A GREEN UMBRELLA.

Perhaps, however, I had better define what Hake and I meant by this
phrase, and to do this I cannot do better than quote the definition of
Nature-worship, by H. A. the "Swimming Rye," which we had both been just
discussing, and which I quoted not long after this memorable walk in a
literary journal:--

"With all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of
water-colour landscape,