"Yes, they aren't a cordial crowd. Here, we'll show them how to take weather!"
We were passing under an apple tree; Jonathan seized a drooping bough, and a sheet of water shook itself out on our shoulders. I gasped and ducked, and a hen who stood too near scuttered off with low duckings of indignation.
"Now you're really wet, you can enjoy yourself," said Jonathan; and there was something in it, though I was loath to admit it at the moment. A moment before I had felt rather appalled at the sight of the rain-swept lane; now I hastened on recklessly.
"I think," said Jonathan, "it's the back of my neck that counts. After that's wet I don't care what happens."
"Yes," I agreed, "that's a stronghold. But I think with me it's my shoulders."
It did not really matter which it was; neck and shoulders both were wet,—back, arms, everything. We tramped down across the hollow, over the brook, whose flood was backing up into the swamp on each side. I paused to look off across the huckleberry hillside beyond.
"How the rain changes everything!" I said.
All the colors had freshened and darkened, and the blur of the rain softened the picture and "brought it together," as the painters say.
"Well," said Jonathan, "woods or open?"
"Which is the wettest?"