The average rainfall is about fifty or fifty-five inches in the Willamette Valley, and along the coast seventy-five inches, or even more at some points—­figures that bring many a dreary night and day to mind, however fine the effect on the great evergreen woods and the fields of the farmers.  The rainy season begins in September or October and lasts until April or May.  Then the whole country is solemnly soaked and poulticed with the gray, streaming clouds and fogs, night and day, with marvelous constancy.  Towards the beginning and end of the season a good many bright days occur to break the pouring gloom, but whole months of rain, continuous, or nearly so, are not at all rare.  Astronomers beneath these Oregon skies would have a dull time of it.  Of all the year only about one fourth of the days are clear, while three fourths have more or less of fogs, clouds, or rain.

The fogs occur mostly in the fall and spring.  They are grand, far-reaching affairs of two kinds, the black and the white, some of the latter being very beautiful, and the infinite delicacy and tenderness of their touch as they linger to caress the tall evergreens is most exquisite.  On farms and highways and in the streets of towns, where work has to be done, there is nothing picturesque or attractive in any obvious way about the gray, serious-faced rainstorms.  Mud abounds.  The rain seems dismal and heedless and gets in everybody’s way.  Every face is turned from it, and it has but few friends who recognize its boundless beneficence.  But back in the untrodden woods where no axe has been lifted, where a deep, rich carpet of brown and golden mosses covers all the ground like a garment, pressing warmly about the feet of the trees and rising in thick folds softly and kindly over every fallen trunk, leaving no spot naked or uncared-for, there the rain is welcomed, and every drop that falls finds a place and use as sweet and pure as itself.  An excursion into the woods when the rain harvest is at its height is a noble pleasure, and may be safely enjoyed at small expense, though very few care to seek it.  Shelter is easily found beneath the great trees in some hollow out of the wind, and one need carry but little provision, none at all of a kind that a wetting would spoil.  The colors of the woods are then at their best, and the mighty hosts of the forest, every needle tingling in the blast, wave and sing in glorious harmony.

   “’T were worth ten years of peaceful life,
     one glance at this array.”

The snow that falls in the lowland woods is usually soft, and makes a fine show coming through the trees in large, feathery tufts, loading the branches of the firs and spruces and cedars and weighing them down against the trunks until they look slender and sharp as arrows, while a strange, muffled silence prevails, giving a peculiar solemnity to everything.  But these lowland snowstorms and their effects quickly vanish; every crystal melts in a day or two, the bent branches rise again, and the rain resumes its sway.