When I awoke at six the light was good, but it was the light of rain. One thrush alone was singing, a few starlings whistled. And the rain lasted until half-past eight. Then the sunlight enshrined itself in the room, the red road glistened, a Lombardy poplar at Kilve Court waved against a white sky only a little blemished by gray, and I started again westward. The black stain of yesterday’s fire on the hill was very black, the new privet leaves very green, and the stitchwort very white in the arches of the drenched grass. The end of the rain, as I hoped, was sung away by missel-thrushes in the roadside oaks, by a chain of larks’ songs which must have reached all over England.

I had some thoughts of branching off on one of the green lanes to the left, that would have led me past a thatched cottage or two up to the ridge of the Quantocks, to Stowborrow Hill, Beacon Hill, Thorncombe Hill, Great Hill, Will’s Neck, Lydeard[291] Hill, Cothelstone Hill, and down to Taunton; but I kept to my road of last night as far as West Quantoxhead. There, beyond the fountain, I entered the road between ranks of lime trees towards Stogumber. Before I had gone a mile the rain returned, and made the roads so bad that I had to take to the highway from Williton to Taunton, and so saw no more of Bicknoller than its brown tower. But I had hopes of the weather, and the rain did no harm to the flowers of periwinkle and laurustinus in the hedges I was passing, and only added a sort of mystery of inaccessibleness to the west wall of the Quantocks, with which I was now going parallel. It was a wall coloured in the main by ruddy dead bracken and dark gorse, but patched sometimes with cultivated strips and squares of green, and trenched by deep coombs of oak, and by the shallow, winding channels of streams—streams not of water but of the most emerald grass. Seagulls mingled with the rooks in the nearer fields. The only people on the road were road-menders working with a steam-roller; the corduroys of one were stained so thoroughly by the red mud of the Quantocks, and shaped so excellently by wear to his tall, spare figure, that they seemed to be one with the man. It reminded me of “Lee Boo,” and how the Pelew Islanders doubted whether the clothes and bodies[292] of the white men did not “form one substance,” and when one took off his hat they were struck with astonishment, “as if they thought it had formed part of his head.”

The rain ceased just soon enough not to prove again the vanity of waterproofs. I have, it is true, discovered several which have brought me through a storm dry in parts, but I have also discovered that sellers of waterproofs are among the worst of liars, and that they communicate their vice with their goods. The one certain fact is that nobody makes a garment or suit which will keep a man both dry and comfortable if he is walking in heavy and beating rain. Suits of armour have, of course, been devised to resist rain, but at best they admit it at the neck. The ordinary (and extraordinary) waterproof may keep a man dry from neck to groin, though it is improbable exceedingly that both neck and wrists will escape. As for the legs, the rain gets at the whole of them with the aid of wind and capillary attraction. Whoever wore a coat that kept his knees dry in a beating rain? I am not speaking of waterproof tubes reaching to the feet. They may be sold, they may even be bought. They may be useful, but not for walking in.

For moderate showers one waterproof is about[293] as good as another. The most advertised have the advantage of being expensive, and conferring distinction: otherwise they are no better, and wear worse, than a thing at two-thirds of the price which is never advertised at all. In such a one I was riding now, and I got wet only at the ankles. It actually kept my knees dry in the heavy rain near Timsbury. But if I had been walking I should have been intolerably hot and embarrassed in this, and very little less so in the lighter, more distinguished, more expensive garment. Supposing that a thorough waterproof exists, so light as to be comfortable in mild weather, it is certain to have the grave disadvantage of being easily tearable, and therefore of barring the wearer from woods.

Getting the body wet even in cold weather is delicious, but getting clothes and parts of the body wet, especially about and below the knee, is detestable. Trousers, and still more breeches, when wet through, prove unfriendly to man, and in some degree to boy. If the knees were free and the feet bare, I should think there would be no impediment left to bliss for an active man in shower or storm, except that he would provoke, evoke, and convoke laughter, and ninety-nine out of a hundred would prefer to this all the evils of rain and of waterproofs. It is to save our clothes and to lessen[294] the discomfort of them that a waterproof is added.

At first thought, it is humiliating to realize that we have spent many centuries in this climate and never produced anything to keep us dry and comfortable in rain. But who are we that complain? Not farmers, labourers, and fishermen, but people who spend much time out of doors by choice. We can go indoors when it rains; only, we do not wish to, because so many of the works of rain are good—in the skies, on the earth, in the souls of men and also of birds. When youth is over we are not carried away by our happiness so far as to ignore soaked boots and trousers. We like hassocks to kneel on, and on those hassocks we pray for a waterproof. As the prayer is only about a hundred years old—a hundred years ago there were no such beings—it is not surprising that the answer has not arrived from that distant quarter. Real outdoor people have either to do without waterproofs, or what they use would disable us from our pleasures. Naturally, they have done nothing to solve our difficulties. They have not written poetry for us, they have not made waterproofs for us. They do not read our poetry, they do not wear our waterproofs. We must solve the question by complaint and experiment, or by learning to go wet—an[295] increasingly hard lesson for a generation that multiplies conveniences and inconveniences rather faster than it does an honest love of sun, wind, and rain, separately and all together.

By the time I reached Crowcombe, the sun was bright. This village, standing at the entrance to a great cloudy coomb of oaks and pine trees, is a thatched street containing the “Carew Arms,” a long, white inn having a small porch, and over it a signboard bearing a coat of arms and the words “J’espère bien.” The street ends in a cross, a tall, slender, tapering cross of stone, iron-brown and silver-spotted. Here also sang a chiffchaff, like a clock rapidly ticking. The church is a little beyond, near the rookery of Crowcombe Court. Its red tower on the verge of the high roadside bank is set at the north-west corner in such a way—perhaps it is not quite at right angles—that I looked again and again up to it, as at a man in a million.

After passing Flaxpool, a tiny cluster of dwellings and ricks, with a rough, rising orchard, then a new-made road with a new signpost to Bridgwater, and then a thatched white inn called the “Stag’s Head,” I turned off for West Bagborough, setting my face toward the wooded flank of Bagborough Hill. Bagborough Churc............