“What is there to do to-day?” is the question they ask.  I know they are about to ask it before they speak.  I have seen it in their listless and disconcerted eyes at breakfast.  It is worse to me than the tolling of a bell; for saddest dead of all are they who have only a “name to live.”

The truth is, there is more to do on a rainy day than on any other.  In addition to all the sweet, needful, possible business of living and working, and learning and helping, which is for all days, there is the beauty of the rainy day to see, the music of the rainy day to hear.  It drums on the window-panes, chuckles and gurgles at corners of houses, tinkles in spouts, makes mysterious crescendoes and arpeggio chords through the air; and all the while drops from the eaves and upper window-ledges are beating time as rhythmical and measured as that of a metronome,—­time to which our own souls furnish tune, sweet or sorrowful, inspiriting or saddening, as we will.  It is a curious experiment to try repeating or chanting lines in time and cadence following the patter of raindrops on windows.  It will sometimes be startling in its effect:  no metre, no accent fails of its response in the low, liquid stroke of the tender drops,—­there seems an uncanny rapport between them at once.

And the beauty of the rain, not even love can find words to tell it.  If it left but one trace, the exquisite shifting sheen of pearls on the outer side of the window glass, that alone one might watch for a day.  In all times it has been thought worthy of kings, of them who are royally rich, to have garments sown thick in dainty lines and shapes with fine seed pearls.  Who ever saw any such embroidery which could compare with the beauty of one pane of glass wrought on a single side with the shining white transparent globulets of rain?  They are millions; they crowd; they blend; they become a silver stream; they glide slowly down, leaving tiniest silver threads behind; they make of themselves a silver bank of miniature sea at the bottom of the pane; and, while they do this, other millions are set pearl-wise at the top, to crowd, blend, glide down in their turn, and overflow the miniature sea.  This is one pane, a few inches square; and rooms have many windows of many panes.  And looking past this spectacle, out of our windows, how is it that we do not each rainy day weep with pleasure at sight of the glistening show?  Every green thing, from tiniest grass-blade lying lowest, to highest waving tips of elms, also set thick with the water-pearls; all tossing and catching, and tossing and catching, in fairy game with the wind, and with the rain itself, always losing, always gaining, changing shape and place and number every moment, till the twinkling and shifting dazzle all eyes.

Then at the end comes the sun, like a magician for whom all had been made ready; at sunset, perhaps, or at sunrise, if the storm has lasted all night.  In one instant the silver balls begin to disappear.  By countless thousands at a time he tosses them back whence they came; but as they go, he changes them, under our eyes, into prismatic globes, holding very light of very light in their tiny circles, shredding and sorting it into blazing lines of rainbow color.