yard in front. I, too, had mentally crowed over the good fortune
of the shower; but before I closed my eyes that night my crest was
a good deal fallen, and I could have wished the friendly elements
had not squared their accounts quite so readily and uproariously.

The one shower did not exhaust the supply a bit; Nature's hand was
full of trumps yet,--yea, and her sleeve too. I stopped at a
trout brook, which came down out of the mountains on the right, and
took a few trout for my supper; but its current was too roily from
the shower for fly-fishing. Another farmhouse attracted me, but
there was no one at home; so I picked a quart of strawberries in
the meadow in front, not minding the wet grass, and about six
o'clock, thinking another storm that had been threatening on my
right had miscarried, I pushed off, and went floating down into the
deepening gloom of the river valley. The mountains, densely
wooded from base to summit, shut in the view on every hand. They
cut in from the right and from the left, one ahead of the other,
matching like the teeth of an enormous trap; the river was caught
and bent, but not long detained, by them. Presently I saw the rain
creeping slowly over them in my rear, for the wind had changed; but
I apprehended nothing but a moderate sundown drizzle, such as we
often get from the tail end of a shower, and drew up in the eddy of
a big rock under an overhanging tree till it should have passed.
But it did not pass; it thickened and deepened, and reached a
steady pour by the time I had calculated the sun would be gilding
the mountain-tops. I had wrapped my rubber coat about my blankets
and groceries, and bared my back to the storm. In sullen silence I
saw the night settling down and the rain increasing; my roof-tree
gave way, and every leaf poured its accumulated drops upon me.
There were streams and splashes where before there had been little