ANIMALS IN RAIN 



* When a blanket wraps the day, 



When the rotten woodland drips, 

 And the leaf is stamped in clay.' 



THE signs and warnings of rain given by birds and 

 animals have for ages been among the commonplace 

 of rustic poets and their more cultivated imitators. 

 But these have, for the most part, been contented 

 to interpret the warnings of animal foreboding and 

 discontent for the benefit of man, without dwelling 

 on the obvious relation which this extreme sensitive- 

 ness to the approach of wet weather bears to the 

 sufferings inflicted by it on what we rightly call the 

 'beasts of the field/ If anyone doubts the danger 

 and discomfort which most wild animals in England 

 undergo in great rains, their effect upon inanimate 

 nature may give some measure of the necessary result 

 to warm-blooded, sensitive, and, for the most part, 

 unsheltered creatures. Take, for instance, a district 

 in which, as sometimes happens, the measured rain- 



