One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say:  What if it should rain?  It always does rain somewhere among the peaks:  the unusual thing is that one should escape it.  You might suppose that if you took any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against showers.  Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how many grow in copse shelters and grow there only.  There is keen delight in the quick showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high altitudes.  The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the canon wall, slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your sun.  Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat down the mimulus beside the brook.  You shelter on the lee of some strong pine with shut-winged butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the wood.  Runnels of rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks.  The sky is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear.  The summer showers leave no wake.

Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.  Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.  Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather—­grown headland to watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air.  Out over meadow or lake region begins a little darkling of the sky,—­no cloud, no wind, just a smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.

It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret canons.  Rain begins, “slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;” a wind comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives.  Such rains relieve like tears.

The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms that alter the face of things.  These come with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks.  They come with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit.  They shake down avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden floods like battle fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and boulders.  They would be kind if they could, but have more important matters.  Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not rain, rather the spillings of Thor’s cup, jarred by the Thunderer.  After such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.