There is no limit to what human beings may be driven to by stress of weather, and especially by that ‘clearing shower,’ by which the dwellers in Lakeland are wont euphemistically to describe its continuous downpours.  The Persians have another name for it—­’the grandmother of all buckets.’  I was once in Wastdale with a dean of the Church of England, respectable, sedate, and a D.D.  It had poured for days without ceasing; the roads were under water, the passes were impassable, the mountains invisible; there was nothing to be seen but waterfalls, and those in the wrong place; there was no literature; the dean’s guide-books were exhausted, and his Bible, it is but charitable and reasonable to suppose, he knew by heart.  As for me, I had found three tourists who could play at whist, and was comparatively independent of the elements; but that poor ecclesiastic!  For the first few days he occupied himself in remonstrating against our playing cards by daylight; but on the fourth morning, when we sat down to them immediately after breakfast, he began to take an enforced interest in our proceedings.  Like a dove above the dovecot, he circled for an hour or two about the table—­a deal one, such as thimble-riggers use, borrowed, under protest, from his own humble bedroom—­and then, with a murmurous coo about the weather showing no signs of clearing up, he took a hand.  Constant dropping—­and it was much worse than dropping—­will wear away a stone, and it is my belief if it had gone on much longer his reverence would have played on Sunday.

The spectacle that the roads of the district present at such a time is most melancholy.  Everyone is in a closed car—­a cross between a bathing machine and that convenient vehicle which carries both corpse and mourners; all the windows seem made of bottle glass, a phenomenon produced by the flattening of the noses of imprisoned tourists; and nothing shines except an occasional traveller in oilskin.  In such seasons, indeed, oilskin (lined with patience) is your only wear.  Ordinary waterproofs in such a climate become mere blotting paper, and with the best of them, without leggings and headgear to match, the poor Londoner might, I do not say just as well be in London (for that is his aspiration all day long), but just as well go to bed at once, and stop there.  ‘But why does he not go home?’ it may be asked:  a question to which there are several answers.  In the first place (for one must take the average in such cases) because he is a fool.  Secondly, like the rest of the well-to-do world, he has suffered the summer, wherein warmth and sunshine are really to be had, to slip by, and has only the fag end of it in which to take holiday.  It is now or never—­or at all events now or next year—­with him.  All his friends, too, are out of town, flattening their noses against window panes; his club is under repair, his house in brown holland, his servants on board wages.  Like the young gentleman in Locksley Hall, he is so