from this great natural lustration is not perhaps polished or dignified; but for the matter of that, few people are dignified when coming out of a bath.  But the scheme of rain in itself is one of an enormous purification.  It realises the dream of some insane hygienist:  it scrubs the sky.  Its giant brooms and mops seem to reach the starry rafters and Starless corners of the cosmos; it is a cosmic spring cleaning.

If the Englishman is really fond of cold baths, he ought not to grumble at the English climate for being a cold bath.  In these days we are constantly told that we should leave our little special possessions and join in the enjoyment of common social institutions and a common social machinery.  I offer the rain as a thoroughly Socialistic institution.  It disregards that degraded delicacy which has hitherto led each gentleman to take his shower-bath in private.  It is a better shower-bath, because it is public and communal; and, best of all, because somebody else pulls the string.

As for the fascination of rain for the water drinker, it is a fact the neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend.  The enthusiastic water drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and debauch of his own favourite beverage.  Think of the imaginative intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret or the golden clouds hock.  Paint upon primitive darkness some such scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with the terrible colours of port.  All this must the wild abstainer feel, as he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven, and listens to the roaring rain.  It is he, the water drinker, who ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are drinking water.  Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it:  the trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs as revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of the world.

All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking:  and Nature makes a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined.  If I count it Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every weed?  I would be ashamed to grumble at it.  As Sir Philip Sidney said, their need is greater than mine—­especially for water.

There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild Highland clan:  a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an incident as an atmosphere.  Surely every man of imagination must feel a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he puts on a mackintosh.  I could never reconcile myself to carrying all umbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the