The scene in water colours thus I paint, Is your own Festival, you Sloppy Saint! Mother of all the Family of Rainers! Saint of the Soakers! Making all people croakers, Like frogs in swampy marshes, and complainers! And why you mizzle forty days together, Giving the earth your water-soup to sup, I marvel--Why such wet, mysterious weather? I wish you’d _clear it up_! Why cast such cruel dampers On pretty Pic Nics, and against all wishes Set the cold ducks a-swimming in the hampers, And volunteer, unask’d, to wash the dishes? Why drive the Nymphs from the selected spot, To cling like lady-birds around a tree-- Why spoil a Gipsy party at their tea, By throwing your cold water upon hot? Cannot a rural maiden, or a man, Seek Hornsey-Wood by invitation, sipping Their green with Pan, But souse you come, and show their Pan all dripping! Why upon snow-white table-cloths and sheets, That do not wait, or want a second washing, Come squashing? Why task yourself to lay the dust in streets, As if there were no Water-Cart contractors, No pot-boys spilling beer, no shop-boys ruddy Spooning out puddles muddy, Milkmaids, and other slopping benefactors! A Queen you are, raining in your own right, Yet oh! how little flatter’d by report! Even by those that seek the Court, Pelted with every term of spleen and spite. Folks rail and swear at you in every place; They say you are a creature of no bowel; They say you’re always washing Nature’s face, And that you then supply her, With nothing drier, Than some old wringing cloud by way of towel! The whole town wants you duck’d, just as you duck it, They wish you on your own mud porridge supper’d, They hope that you may kick your own big bucket, Or in your water-butt go sous! heels up’ard! They are, in short, so weary of your drizzle, They’d spill the water in your veins to stop it-- Be warn’d! You are too partial to a mizzle-- Pray _drop it_! [Illustration: “IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS.”] [Illustration: A FIGURE OF SPEECH:--A BROAD SCOTCHMAN.] THE APPARITION. A TRUE STORY. “To keep without a reef in a gale of wind like that--Jock was the only boatman on the Firth of Tay to do it!”-- “He had sail enough to blow him over Dundee Law.”-- “She’s emptied her ballast and come up again,--with her sails all standing--every sheet was belayed with a double turn.” I give the sense rather than the sound of the foregoing speeches, for the speakers were all Dundee ferry-boatmen, and broad Scotchmen, using the extra-wide dialect of Angus-shire and Fife.