A RAINY DAY IN TOWN.

SOME cynical person has remarked that people are given to talk most about what they least understand—an observation, by the way, which although it has passed into a maxim pretty generally current, is, like most of the dicta of your sarcastic philosophers, true only in a limited sense. It is strikingly true, however, with regard to John Bull and his numerous family whenever their talk is about the weather. John, from his insular position, is more exposed to the "skiey influences," as fine writers call the changes of the weather, than any of his neighbours; and being a personage whose business, and whose pleasures too, lie very much out of doors, he would be glad to know, were it possible, how to manage his movements so as to escape the foul and enjoy the fair. Hence it is that the weather, and its probable state at some not very distant or closely impending period, is a universal topic of conversation with honest John. It is a question in which he has a personal interest, and one often of greater moment than any other which a mere casual acquaintance could discuss with him. A Frenchman or a German, an Italian or a Spaniard, may, it is true, be equally interested in the weather-but then he is seldom, if ever, in the same uncertainty respecting it. With a wind from any point but the west or south-west, your continental friend does not fear getting drenched to the skin; but John knows from awkward experience, that he has no cause for solid reliance upon any wind that blows; and that rain may come to him, and does come to him at times, from all points of the

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compass. So he is ever on his guard against it, and prophesies concerning its advent and departure-not very often, it must be confessed, with the happiest result-thus showing that though he talks so much about it, he understands it very little indeed. But he is not content with talking only -if he were, he wouldn't be John Bull. He arms himself against foul weather, as he would against any other enemy; and has contrived no end of munitions and fortifications against the assaults which the clouds are for ever preparing or discharging upon his devoted head. If, on the one hand, he is annoyed by water, he is, on the other, defiant in "waterproof." Run your eye down the columns of his morning paper, and see what a prodigious store of bulwarks he has prepared against the storm. Read the list of gallant defenders, with the immortal Macintosh at their head, who have levied contributions from the resources of universal nature for the purpose of keeping the hostile moisture on the safe side of John's waistcoat-from coats of four ounces, "warranted to keep out twelve hours' rain," to coats of twice as many capes, which would laugh at a monsoon-and from idrotobolic hats, which keep his bald pate dry, and ventilate it at the same time, to gutta-percha soles that don't know, and won't be prevailed upon, under any circumstances, to know, what it is to be damp. Think of voluminous folds of vulcanised caoutchouc and gutta-perchified cloth-of rugs and railway wrappers-of paletôts, bequemes, bear-skins, pea-coats, Chesterfields, Codringtons, Witney Overs, Derby coats, Melton-Mowbrays, Wellington sacs and wrap-rascals -to say nothing of the millions of umbrellas, of which everybody has one to use and two to lend: think of all these, and a thousand more of the same sort, and say if John Bull be not tolerably well provided against yonder black cloud.

Come, we are not going to be afraid of a rainy day, at any rate, though we do prefer the sunshine; and it is well

we are not, for it is coming down in torrents just now, and we must be off to the office to our daily task, let it come as it may. Jones, our volatile neighbour in the "two-pair back," has just declared, in our hearing, to his wife, that this is a "delectable swizzle," and no mistake. We know what that means, well enough. But Jones's wife has tied a comforter round his chin, and he is off, and we must follow close at his heels, "swizzle" as it will, or else lose a character for punctuality, which will never do. The street-door slams us out. Whew! but it is a soaker! What a clatter the big drops make upon the strained silk!-we could spare such hydraulic music. The sky is one dull sheet of lead; the nearest houses appear as if veiled in a gauze dress, and the further ones are behind a wet blanket, and won't appear at all. All London is just now under the douche, and undergoing a course of hydropathic treatment. Much good may it do thee, thou dear old wilderness of brick: thy alimentary canal has long been out of order. Drink, old Babylon! Drink, and forget thy filthiness, and show thy countless offspring a clean face when the morrow's sun lights up thy forest of tall towers. In the meantime, though, this is but a sorry joke. Slippety, sloppety, squash! Concern that loose paving-stone! and an ovation to the man of genius who invented gaiters, by which we are spared an involuntary "futz." What is that? "Clickety, clackety, skrsh!" Pattens, by all that is poetical! "O the days when we were young!" as the poet says, when pattens were the genteel thing-when comfortable dowagers went waddling abroad exalted on iron rings, and with their heads buried in calashes shaped like a gentleman's cab, only not quite so big. Ah, those were the days! What a rush of tender recollections comes with the clatter of that single pair of pattens! It seems an age since we last heard that once familiar sound; and it seems, too, as though we had entered a new world since that sound was of everyday occurrence.

But we must not indulge in these pensive recollections. Swizh-p-r-r-r-r-r-r-p! whirr!-no indeed!-if this isn't enough to swill all sentiment out of a fellow. "Halloo! Conductor, stop that bus!"

"Full inside, sir: plenty of room outside, sir!"

"Not a doubt of it; but I'm outside already."

No admission for gentlemen in distress. Never mindwe shall be sure to find an omnibus in the City Road that will take us in. Really, this is the very sort of a day to turn into a night; and were it not for the despotism of Business, that genius of modern activities, who rules us, as he rules all his subjects, with an iron sceptre, we should be tempted to follow the example of an eccentric artist of the last century, and by turning back to our home once more, and by simply closing the window-shutters, lighting candles, and poking up the fire, transform this drenching morning into a cheerful evening. But that won't do either, lest we fall into a practice that will entail upon us rainy days of a still less endurable complexion. Sweeper Jack, yonder, is of the same way of thinking; he has scraped his crossing as clean as he can with his worn-out broom-stump; but his function is no sinecure this morning, as new puddles are forming every minute in the track which his daily sweepings have hollowed out. He cannot afford to lose his morning coppers; and though he is wet through to the skin, and has been for this hour past, he will not quit his post till his last regular patron has gone by on his way to the City. He holds out a hand, sodden like a washerwoman's, for his customary half-penny, and deposits it in one of his Bluchers, lying high and dry under the shelter of a doorway-a piece of practical economy that, because he finds it cheaper to subject the soles of his bare feet to the mud and slush of the season, than it would be to submit the soles of leather to the same destructive ordeal. Sweeper Jack is not much worse off on such a day as this than the whole tribe of peripatetic

traders whom the sky serves for a roof every day in the year, and who prefer the risk of drowning abroad to the certainty of starving at home. "Eels! live eels!" cries one; and we can fancy them swimming at their ease in the broad basket in which they are borne aloft. The soles, haddocks, and cod are travelling once more in their own element, and the salesmen are particularly lively, knowing, by experience, that a drenching day, when economical housewives don't care to plunge over the way or round the corner to the butcher's, is not unfavourable to their trade. Ten to one that we find a cod's head and shoulders on the table when we return to dinner at five. Charley Coster's cart looks remarkably fresh and green this morning; but that poor "moke" of his is evidently depressed in spirits, and, after the manner of his kind, lowers his head and bends back his ears in silent deprecation of the extra weight of moisture he has to drag through the miry streets. Yonder is a potatosteamer, which the prudent proprietor has moored snugly under a covered archway: his little tin funnel is fizzing away amongst a group of boys and lads driven there for shelter from the storm. He has got his steam up early today-foul weather acting invariably as an impetus to his peculiar commerce: a hot buttered potato for a halfpenny, with salt à discrétion, as the French say, is too good a bargain to go far a-begging on such a morning as this. Another wandering son of commerce, who profits especially when the clouds are dropping fatness, is that umbrella hawker, who stands there at the corner, roofed in under a monster-dome of gingham, from which he utters ever and anon in a cavernous voice: "A good um'rella for sixpence! Sixpence for a good um'rella! A silk un for a shilling!" You will not see him driving business in that fashion when the sky is without a cloud; you might as well look for a rainbow. He gets his living by rainy days; and if he could regulate the calendar in his own way, 'twere but little hay