water drinker, it is a fact the
neglect of which I simply cannot comprehend. The enthusiastic water
drinker must regard a rainstorm as a sort of universal banquet and
debauch of his own favourite beverage. Think of the imaginative
intoxication of the wine drinker if the crimson clouds sent down claret
or the golden clouds hock. Paint upon primitive darkness some such
scenes of apocalypse, towering and gorgeous skyscapes in which champagne
falls like fire from heaven or the dark skies grow purple and tawny with
the terrible colours of port. All this must the wild abstainer feel, as
he rolls in the long soaking grass, kicks his ecstatic heels to heaven,
and listens to the roaring rain. It is he, the water drinker, who
ought to be the true bacchanal of the forests; for all the forests are
drinking water. Moreover, the forests are apparently enjoying it: the
trees rave and reel to and fro like drunken giants; they clash boughs
as revellers clash cups; they roar undying thirst and howl the health of
the world.

All around me as I write is a noise of Nature drinking: and Nature makes
a noise when she is drinking, being by no means refined. If I count
it Christian mercy to give a cup of cold water to a sufferer, shall I
complain of these multitudinous cups of cold water handed round to all
living things; a cup of water for every shrub; a cup of water for every
weed? I would be ashamed to grumble at it. As Sir Philip Sidney said,
their need is greater than mine—especially for water.

There is a wild garment that still carries nobly the name of a wild
Highland clan: a elan come from those hills where rain is not so much an
incident as an atmosphere. Surely every man of imagination must feel
a tempestuous flame of Celtic romance spring up within him whenever he
puts on a mackintosh. I could never reconcile myself to carrying all
umbrella; it is a pompous Eastern business, carried over the heads of
despots in the dry, hot lands. Shut up, an umbrella is an unmanageable
walking stick; open, it is an inadequate tent. For my part, I have no
taste for pretending to be a walking pavilion; I think nothing of my
hat, and precious little of my head. If I am to be protected against
wet, it must be by some closer and more careless protection, something
that I can forget altogether. It might be a Highland plaid. It might be
that yet more Highland thing, a mackintosh.

And there is really something in the mackintosh of the military
q