ance of
oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow or
blazing upon ice jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing in all this
to complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities,--its
slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like
new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by exploding
thunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties,
--sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and
casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull,
dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too
spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the
way of fair weather; wet beneath and above; reminding one of that
rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal
Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment,--

"A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench,--
The land it soaks is putrid;"

or rather, as everything animate and inanimate is seething in warm mist,
suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the
efficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save the
heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous melancholy
drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of waterducts,
swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored
horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond
which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the
ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who can
extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick
of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted.

Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just now. One gains nothing by
attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at the
keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselves
through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of
the rain-drops.

I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loose-jointed
figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-browned and wind-dried; small,
quick-winking black eyes. There he stands, the water dripping from his
pulpy hat and ragged elbows.

I speak to him, but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of misery,
quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read
what purports to be a melancho