grey day.  I could hear the rain dripping from the fir-trees on to the scullery roof, and every now and then a gust of wind drove the rain down on the soaked lawn with a noise like breaking surf.  I could hear the water gurgling in the pipe that was hidden by the ivy, and I saw with interest that one of the paths was flooded, so that a canal ran between the standard rose bushes and recalled pictures of Venice.  I thought it would be nice if it rained truly hard and flooded the house, so that we should all have to starve for three weeks, and then be rescued excitingly in boats; but I had not really any hope.  Behind me in the schoolroom my two brothers were playing chess, but had not yet started quarrelling, and in a corner my little sister was patiently beating a doll.  There was a fire in the grate, but it was one of those sombre, smoky fires in which it is impossible to take any interest.  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, and I realised that an eternity of these long seconds separated me from dinner-time.  I thought I would like to go out.

The enterprise presented certain difficulties and dangers, but none that could not be surpassed.  I would have to steal down to the hall and get my boots and waterproof on unobserved.  I would have to open the front door without making too much noise, for the other doors were well guarded by underlings, and I would have to run down the front drive under the eyes of many windows.  Once beyond the gate I would be safe, for the wetness of the day would secure me from dangerous encounters.  Walking in the rain would be pleasant than staying in the dull schoolroom, where life remained unchanged for a quarter of an hour at a time; and I remembered that there was a little wood near our house in which I had never been when it was raining hard.  Perhaps I would meet the magician for whom I had looked so often in vain on sunny days, for it was quite likely that he preferred walking in bad weather when no one else was about.  It would be nice to hear the drops of rain falling on the roof of the trees, and to be quite warm and dry underneath.  Perhaps the magician would give me a magic wand, and I would do things like the conjurer last Christmas.

Certainly I would be punished when I got home, for even if I were not missed they would see that my boots were muddy and that my waterproof was wet.  I would have no pudding for dinner and be sent to bed in the afternoon:  but these things had happened to me before, and though I had not liked them at the time, they did not seem very terrible in retrospect.  And life was so dull in the schoolroom that wet morning when I was eight years old!