And when I said, "It's too bad it rained just as we got here," my driver said, "It's always rainin' on the mountains," although when he was getting me for a passenger he had assured me it wouldn't rain on the mountain.
We made our way down through the wet, but still beautifully purple heather, and just as we reached the level the rain stopped. It was as if our feet upon the mountain had precipitated the rain.
But at the close of the drive I found a comfortable inn and a most agreeable dinner of fresh caught fish, and that mutton that we never seem to get in America, and I still felt that the climb was worth the wetting.
But the weather never ceases to astonish me. Dull gray skies at home would depress me, but here I am thankful for dull gray skies if they only stop leaking long enough to enable me to do my accomplished task of walking or driving.
But real rain has no terrors for countryman or city man in Ireland. I attended a concert at the exhibition in Dublin (and it would not have been a tax on the imagination to pretend one was at Lunar Park in Coney Island or at the French Exposition or the Pan-American). There was the usual bandstand, and the Dublin populace to the extent of several thousands were seated on little chairs listening to the combined bands of H. M. Second Life Guards, the Eighty-seventh Royal Irish Fusiliers (Faugh-a-Ballaghs) and the Forty-second Royal Highlanders (the Black Watch).
Outside the circle of those in seats passed and repassed a slowly promenading crowd made up of pretty Dublin girls and their escorts, with mustaches as spindle-waxed as ever any Frenchman's, a sprinkling of English, and the ever-present Americans, with their alert eyes, the Americans straw-hatted, the English derbied, and the Irish, almost to a man, wearing huge, soft green or gray-visored cloth caps.
Suddenly the rain began to fall.
I know at least two Americans who put for shelter, but the Irish people present merely put up umbrellas and went on promenading and sitting and listening to the music. Gay strains from "The Mikado" (there were no Japanese present), somber umbrellas, colorful millinery and drizzling rain. An American crowd would have made for the main exhibition building, but I doubt if the Dubliners noticed that it was raining. Their umbrellas went up under subconscious direction.
After the concert the crowds went home in the double-decker electric trams, and every seat on the roof of every car was filled by the holiday crowd, although the rain was still coming down in a relentless fashion.
In the north they would have called it a bit soft. I know we felt like mush when we arrived at our hotel.