Every year such days came--any time in Lent, or even before. I take it for granted that, as an historical fact, they were followed, as they have been in the twentieth century, by fog, frost, mists, drizzle, rain, sleet, snow, east wind, and north wind, and I know very well that we resented these things. But we loved the sun. We strove to it in imagination through the bad weather, believing in every kind of illusory hint that the rain was going to stop, and so on. Moreover rain had its merits. For example, on a Sunday, it kept the roads nearly as quiet as on a week day, and we could have Our Country, or Richmond Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves. Then, again, what a thing it was to return wet, with a rainy brightness in your eyes, to change rapidly, to run round to Abercorran House, and find Philip and Ann expecting you in the kitchen, with a gooseberry tart, currant tart, raspberry tart, plum tart, blackberry tart, cranberry and apple tart, apple tart, according to season; and mere jam or syrup tart in the blank periods. My love of mud also I trace to that age, because Philip and I could escape all company by turning out of a first class road into the black mash of a lane. If we met anyone there, it was a carter contending with the mud, a tramp sitting between the bank and a fire, or a filthy bird-catcher beyond the hedge.
If the lane was both muddy and new to us, and we two, Philip and I, turned into it, there was nothing which we should have thought out of its power to present in half a mile or so, nothing which it would have overmuch astonished us by presenting. It might have been a Gypsy camp, it might have been the terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad--we should have fitted either into our scheme of the universe. Not that we were _blasé_; for every new thrush’s egg in the season had a new charm for us. Not that we had been flightily corrupted by fairy tales and marvels. No: the reason was that we only regarded as impossible such things as a score of 2000 in first class cricket, an air ship, or the like; and the class of improbabilities did not exist for us. Nor was this all. We were not merely ready to welcome strange things when we had walked half a mile up a lane and met no man, but we were in a gracious condition for receiving whatever might fall to us. We did not go in search of miracles, we invited them to come to us. What was familiar to others was never, on that account, tedious or contemptible to us. I remember that when Philip and I first made our way through London to a shop which was depicted in an advertisement, in spite of the crowds on either hand all along our route, in spite of the full directions of our elders, we were as much elated by our achievement as if it had been an arduous discovery made after a journey in a desert. In our elation there was some suspicion that our experience had been secret, adventurous, and unique. As to the crowd, we glided through it as angels might. This building, expected by us and known to all, astonished us as much as the walls of Sheddad the son of Ad unexpectedly towering would have done.