BY the dead, leaden light of the morning we were aroused from as cosy a nap as tired travellers could desire, by a mournful sound — a reveillé of rain-drops, beating with monotonous clearness on window and wall, with a soprano and ground-bass accompaniment made by the streams from the roof furrows and the distant roll of the thunder, and a particularly dismal obligato pitter-pitter, patter-pattering in the pools all over the courtyard, that did not in the least add to the concordia discors of the unpropitious weather.

Staring out of the window, the picture was still more dismal. Nothing looked as we saw it last evening, save the water-lilies — but they are aquatic. The only animals stirring were the ducks, provokingly enjoying the calamity in their own silly way, and bubbling and billing at the water and mud as if their lives depended on its presence and thorough mixture — they also were aquatic.

The ponies and mules stood downcast and woe-begone, their ears and tails drooping, and their pendent heads showing a very rueful expression, in the damp-bottomed shed that was without a particle of bedding. They seemed as if a day's rest would have been more fitting in their depressed state than a resumption of labour.

Not an inmate of the house moved out; but, ensconced below the most trivial cover, were the dotard old men with children, and the madcaps of other ages waiting for our levée with the soberest and most imperturbable equanimity possible, never moving to the right or left, seldom stirring a limb, and always keeping their faces towards the window, from which they were stayed only by the drenching rain.