The rain was setting about its work in earnest.  The world was full of that rending, swishing sound which accompanies the more violent summer storms.  Thunder crashed, and lightning flicked out of the grey heavens.  Out in the street the raindrops bounded up off the stones like fairy fountains.  Archie surveyed them morosely from his refuge in the entrance of a shop.

And then, suddenly, like one of those flashes which were lighting up the gloomy sky, a thought lit up his mind.

“By Jove!  If this keeps up, there won’t be a ball-game to-day!”

With trembling fingers he pulled out his watch.  The hands pointed to five minutes to three.  A blessed vision came to him of a moist and disappointed crowd receiving rain-checks up at the Polo Grounds.

“Switch it on, you blighters!” he cried, addressing the leaden clouds.  “Switch it on more and more!”

It was shortly before five o’clock that a young man bounded into a jeweller’s shop near the Hotel Cosmopolis—­a young man who, in spite of the fact that his coat was torn near the collar and that he oozed water from every inch of his drenched clothes, appeared in the highest spirits..  It was only when he spoke that the jeweller recognised in the human sponge the immaculate youth who had looked in that morning to order a bracelet.

“I say, old lad,” said this young man, “you remember that jolly little what-not you showed me before lunch?”

“The bracelet, sir?”

“As you observe with a manly candour which does you credit, my dear old jeweller, the bracelet.  Well, produce, exhibit, and bring it forth, would you mind?  Trot it out!  Slip it across on a lordly dish!”

“You wished me, surely, to put it aside and send it to the Cosmopolis to-morrow?”

The young man tapped the jeweller earnestly on his substantial chest.

“What I wished and what I wish now are two bally separate and dashed distinct things, friend of my college days!  Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day, and all that!  I’m not taking any more chances.  Not for me!  For others, yes, but not for Archibald!  Here are the doubloons, produce the jolly bracelet Thanks!”

The jeweller counted the notes with the same unction which Archie had observed earlier in the day in the proprietor of the second-hand clothes-shop.  The process made him genial.

“A nasty, wet day, sir, it’s been,” he observed, chattily.

Archie shook his head.

“Old friend,” he said, “you’re all wrong.  Far otherwise, and not a bit like it, my dear old trafficker in gems!  You’ve put your finger on the one aspect of this blighted p.m. that really deserves credit and respect.  Rarely in the experience of a lifetime have I encountered a day so absolutely bally in nearly every shape and form, but there was one thing that saved it, and that was its merry old wetness!  Toodle-oo, laddie!”

“Good evening, sir,” said the jeweller.