“What house?” I retorted, pardonably snappy. I hope never to revisit Dundale. CHAPTER X Let me earnestly urge any of my hearers who may be fired by my example to follow it, never to go to Dundale. It is a desolate place, and a hungry place; and a place, moreover, greatly subject to becoming enveloped in a sort of universal gray cloud, emitting a steady though fine drizzle and accounted for--which made it none the less wet--by persons who knew everything, like Jellaby, as being a sea-mist. I am no doubt very stupid, and therefore was unable to understand why there should be a sea-mist when there was no sea. “Well, we’re in Sussex now you know,” said Jellaby, on my saying something of the sort to him. “Indeed,” said I politely, as though that explained it; but of course it did not. Up to this point we had at least, since the first night, been dry. Now the rain began, and caravaning in rain is an experience that must be met with one’s entire stock of fortitude and philosophy. This stock, however large originally, has a tendency to give out after drops have trickled down inside one’s collar for some hours. At the other end, too, the wet ascends higher and higher, for is not one wading about in long and soaking grass, trying to perform one’s (so to speak) household duties? And if, when the ascending wet and the descending wet meet, and the whole man is a mere and very unhappy sponge, he can still use such words as healthy and jolly, then I say that that man is either a philosopher indeed, worthy of and ripe for an immediate tub, or he is a liar and a hypocrite. I heard both those adjectives often that day, and silently divided their users into the proper categories. For myself I preferred to say nothing, thus producing private flowers of stoicism in response to the action of the rain. For the first time I was glad to walk, glad to move on, glad of anything that was not helping dripping ladies to pack up dripping breakfast things beneath the dripping umbrella that with studious gallantry I endeavoured to hold the while over my and their dripping heads. However healthy and jolly the wet might be it undoubtedly made the company more silent than the dry, and our resumed march was almost entirely without conversation. We moved on in a southwesterly direction, the diseased fledgling still in bed and still, I was credibly informed, scratching, through pine woods full of wet bracken and deep gloom and drizzle, till at a place called Frant we turned off due south in response to some unaccountable impulse of Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s, whose unaccountable impulses were the capricious rudder which swayed us hither and thither during the entire tour.