CHAPTER XXVI
NOVEMBER RAIN
Close, perpendicular, quiet rain came upon me when I was ten miles from last night's shelter and ten miles from my end. Shelter was not near, nor indeed to be thought of in an untrodden lane which had been, for some time, and seemed to go on for ever, winding through the delicious, vacant country of a late autumn Sunday, while it was yet early in the day and yet not so early but that the milking was over, and the milk carts gone, and the cattle satisfied and slow after their first questing in the fields. The rain was so dense, and the light so restrained, and the drops hung so about my eyes, and the sound and the sweetness of it made my brain so well contented with all that umber country asleep, that what I saw was little compared with what reached me by touch and by darker channels still. I rarely see much in the country—a few herbs underfoot, the next field, the horizon woods, some brief light that shows only its departing hem; for, like others, I always carry out into the fields a vast baggage of prejudices from books and strong characters whom I have met. My going forth, although simple enough to the eye, is truly as pompous as that of a rajah who goes through the jungle on a tall and richly encrusted elephant, with a great retinue, and much ceremony and noise. As
138
