Well, I knew it would not be over for ninety days, and already there were drops on the inside of the green umbrella. I was seriously weighing the situation when Tiglath-Pileser appeared upon the verandah. He had come out to say that the rains always broke with thunder-storms, that this was practically a thunder-storm, and that he considered my situation, under the tallest tree in the neighbourhood, too exposed. He had to think of something; that was what he thought of, and I was pleased to find it convincing. “Shall I take it for granted,” I inquired blandly, “whenever it comes down in bucketfuls like this, that there is thunder in the air, and come in?” and Tiglath-Pileser said that he thought it would be as well. So I am in--in to spend the day. It does not sound in any way remarkable, which shows how entirely custom is our measure for the significance of things. It is really an excursion into the known and familiar, become unusual and exciting by banishment; and it brings one fresh sense of how easy it would be to make life--almost any--vivid and interesting by a discreet and careful use of abstinence. I am not praising the pleasures of the anchorite; his is an undiscriminating experience upon quite a lower plane; but, oh, restraint, the discipline of the greedy instinct, how it brings out the colours of life! To have learnt this lesson only makes it worth while to have come through the world. People to whom a roof is normal have never, I venture to say, known the sense of shelter I feel to-day, the full enclosure of the four walls, the independence of the dry floor. The hill-man who watches the long slant of the rain into the valley from a cave out there on the road to Thibet, where a little heap of cold embers often tell of such a one’s refuging, may offer me intelligent sympathy--I should criticise any one else’s.