VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 191, 14 August 1931, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

FOUND IN THE RAIN

Jt was my experience recently to settle down for some months in one of our fifty-seven varieties of Oregon climate where the ram comes down in a steady gray drizzle most of the winter. I did not like it. I said, hovering drearily by a fire, This rain interferes with everything—with golf, sunsets, clothes drying on the line.” Then my attention was arrested by the boy who brought the mill(. Early in the morning he came, * singing like some lark telling the world it »>as spring, f-fe interested me. I ran down the steps to meel hint. “Fine morning to be out, I ventured. “You belcher!” he came back out °f dripping raindrops. ‘‘Saw a fox in the canon—a silver fox! If 1 k‘n ketch ’im, I’ll tame ’im!” The boy hurried off, resuming his cheerful song, and I sal thinking. The sun didn’t shine—but there was a fox in the canon, a silver fox! A visitor from the mighty mountains with all his mountain atmosphere about him. . . 1 got into rain clothes and set out to find the fox. ... 7 never found him—but I found so much else: great, still forest trees bearing the dignity of centuries . . and at their feet the most enchanting mosses and lichens that sprouted but yesterday, marvellous growths that only incessant rain could make possible. I found Oregon grape, that shiny-waxy-leafed shrub that I borders every road and roofs every trail in this green-winter land, glistening in the rain and sending back points of light like newly polished mahogany. I found pussy willows bursting toward fulfilment. 1 found, in the terraced heights of this mountainous country, tints and shadings unimagined; soft, ghostly grays, draperies for a dream; blues like gaint flame-shadows and as illusive between the Varying banks of forest green—and 1 found an artist perched on a hill under a huge umbrella, trying to catch the lovely colours through their veils of silver mist. ‘‘Marvellous —marvellous!” he breathed, scarcely seeing me. And I had been blind to all this beauty, absorbed in regrets over a little guttapercha ball, over clothes drying on the line. ... I ceased complaining of what Was not in the country and set about finding what was. —Anne Shannon Monroe, in “Singing in the Rain.”