During a foot-tramp of some four hundred miles, which I once had the pleasure of making upon English soil, and which led me from the mouth of the Thames to its sources, and thence through Derbyshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and all of the Lake counties, I do not think that the violence of the rain kept me housed for more than five days out of forty.  Not to say that the balance showed sunshine and a bonny sky; on the contrary, a soft, lubricating mist is the normal condition of the British atmosphere; and a neutral tint of gray sky, when no wet is falling, is almost sure to call out from the country-landlord, if communicative, an explosive and authoritative, “Fine morning, this, Sir!”

The really fine, sunny days—­days you believed in rashly, upon the sunny evidence of such blithe poets as Herrick—­are so rare, that, after a month of British travel, you can count them on your fingers.  On such a one, by a piece of good fortune, I saw all the parterres of Hampton Court,—­its great vine, its labyrinthine walks, its stately alleys, its ruddy range of brick, its clipped lindens, its rotund and low-necked beauties of Sir Peter Lely, and the red geraniums flaming on the window-sills of once royal apartments, where the pensioned dowagers now dream away their lives.  On another such day, Twickenham, and all its delights of trees, bowers, and villas, were flashing in the sun as brightly as ever in the best days of Horace Walpole or of Pope.  And on yet another, after weary tramp, I toiled up to the inn-door of “The Bear,” at Woodstock; and after a cut or two into a ripe haunch of Oxfordshire mutton, with certain “tiny kickshaws,” I saw, for the first time, under the light of a glorious sunset, that exquisite velvety stretch of the park of Woodstock, dimpled with water, dotted with forest—­clumps, where companies of sleek fallow-deer were grazing by the hundred, where pheasants whirred away down the aisles of wood, where memories of Fair Rosamond and of Rochester and of Alice Lee lingered,—­and all brought to a ringing close by Southey’s ballad of “Blenheim,” as the shadow of the gaunt Marlborough column slanted across the path.

There are other notable places, however, which seem—­so dependent are we on first impressions—­to be always bathed in a rain-cloud.  It is quite impossible, for instance, for me to think of London Bridge save as a great reeking thoroughfare, slimy with thin mud, with piles of umbrellas crowding over it, like an army of turtles, and its balustrade steaming with wet.  The charming little Dulwich Gallery, with its Bonningtons and Murillos, I remember as situated somewhere (for I could never find it again of my own head) at a very rainy distance from London, under the spout of an interminable waterfall.  The guide-books talk of a pretty neighborhood, and of a thousand rural charms thereabout; I remember only one or two draggled policemen in oil-skin capes, and with heads slanted to the wind, and my cabby, in a four-caped coat, shaking