I like a rainy day. None of your drizzling, half-and-half affairs, but an uncompromising, driving, wholesale, gusty whirlwind of water, that comes rattling, pell-mell, against the windows, that floods sidewalks, and swells gutters, and turns umbrellas inside out, and gives the trees a good shaking. I am sure on that day of slippers and a morning dress till bedtime. I am sure of time to look over the piles of magazines and newspapers that have been accumulating. I can answer some of those haunting letters, or write autographs; I can loll and think; I can put that wretched-looking desk to rights; I can polish up that time-worn gold pen; I can empty and refill my inkstand. I can do a thousand necessary things which a bright, sunshiny day would veto. Of course I don't want it to keep on raining a month. I shall want to wake some day and find a bright sky and clean pavements; but meanwhile I delight in these rattling windows, which make the bright coal-fire look so pleasant, and secure to me an uninterrupted morning; for whoso robs me of my morning, robs me of that which does not enrich him, and leaves me poor indeed. After midday, "come one, come all," etc. But how to make anybody save a writer understand this, is the question. Why you can't write at another portion of the day just as well; why you can't make an exception in their particular case; why an interruption of half an hour or an hour more or less in the morning should matter—this is incomprehensible to persons who, at the same time, would think you quite an idiot, should you undertake to explain to them why uncorked champagne should be after a while flat and stale. "But I can't come at any other time," once urged a person, with more frankness than consideration, who came on her own personal business. Now it is very disagreeable to be obliged to say "no" more than once to the same person; and yet when one's necessary and imperative arrangements of time are disregarded, it is manifestly pardonable. It is a curious fact, however, that authors themselves, who better than anybody else should understand the necessities of the case, are often culpable in this regard; they who, more than anybody else, revel in rainy mornings, or any morning which secures to them uninterrupted time and thought. I am not sure, after all my preaching, of not doing the same thing myself. If I should, I trust nobody will have any scruples about turning me out.