"No, you don't," he said. "Just think it over between here and Sidmouth."
And he was right. Before I had walked two miles I knew that he was right. I don't enjoy walking in the rain, though I often do it, and always claim to like it. I merely walk in it for the rather subtle enjoyment of getting out of it, and for the sake of plumbing a little more deeply, at my journey's end, the everyday delights of dryness, warmth, and a deep-bosomed chair. I become a Tibetan at the prayer-wheel storing up joys to come in a whetted appetite for to-morrow's blue sky. For though I must admit that there's a certain decorative effect about rain over a countryside, yet it's an effect of pure melancholy, scientifically unfounded of course—at any rate until science can explain the proposition at the beginning of this letter—heightening loneliness, exaggerating the hardship of toil, deepening the horror of death, but adding quite an extraordinary power to any gleam of even the tearfullest of sunshine that may have stumbled into some corner of the landscape. And there's always the possibility of that gleam being the herald of a sudden conquest of glory, in whose triumph your merely fair-weather pedestrian can never have a part.
Thus a memory comes back to me, for instance, of a dreary five-in-the-morning start, a hopeless breakfast, a dogged rain-soaked tramp up the steep hillside—and then the summit of Ben Lomond, a very ark above the flood, borne up, as it were, into the midmost sanctuary of heaven, with the submerging seas rolling out to the world's end, and the wind thrilling over them like an organ. Ten minutes ago, and the sun had lost itself for ever. And now it flamed there like the white throne of God, till the horizons melted before its gaze, and the great dead began majestically to rise—Ben More, Ben Lawers, the Cairngorms, and the distant peaks of Arran.
My sunshine on Saturday last however was not, I should think, more than twelve years old. She was standing rather pensively (but without agitation) near a cottage gate; and fortunately I had provided myself with some bulls'-eyes at a village called Branscombe, where a kindly old lady had assured me that there was still a great demand for them. I extracted one from the bag, and was thanked politely but by no means deferentially. There was a moment's pause during which a damp physician was being gravely relegated to his proper sphere in the natural scheme of things—an obviously humble one. Then she threw me a fact.
"Nellie arn't got one," she observed.
So I gave her one for Nellie.
"Anybody else?" I inquired.
She looked down for a minute at the plump and striped confection.
"Mother likes them things," she said—and I had seen by this time, of course, that her mother must be a very nice mother. So she accepted one for mother.
"And is that all?" I asked.