It must be confessed that, at that moment, he had no very agreeable
employment either for his moral or his physical perceptions. The day was
dawning from a patch of watery light in the east, and sullen clouds
came driving up before it, from which the rain descended in a thick, wet
mist. It streamed from every twig and bramble in the hedge; made little
gullies in the path; ran down a hundred channels in the road; and
punched innumerable holes into the face of every pond and gutter. It
fell with an oozy, slushy sound among the grass; and made a muddy kennel
of every furrow in the ploughed fields. No living creature was anywhere
to be seen. The prospect could hardly have been more desolate if
animated nature had been dissolved in water, and poured down upon the
earth again in that form.
The range of view within the solitary traveller was quite as cheerless
as the scene without. Friendless and penniless; incensed to the last
degree; deeply wounded in his pride and self-love; full of independent
schemes, and perfectly destitute of any means of realizing them; his
most vindictive enemy might have been satisfied with the extent of his
troubles.
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