Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/60

 East. At first these unsightly things worried us; but soon there came to us a reproving voice from the everlasting hills, saying, “Oh, you poor anxious atoms away down there in the glen, fretting your small souls because of an inartistic cowshed, forgetting God’s beauty all around and above you. Are you not ashamed?” We were ashamed, and these things at least are no longer “a speck in our sunshine.”

Many of our Eastern friends have written us that the Oregon rains must be terrible, the many gray days pressing heavily upon us poor mortals cooped up in our little mountain home. But this sympathy is not altogether called for. In the first place, the rains here don’t come with a wind that wraps your skirts about you like a winding-sheet and turns your umbrella inside out. They fall straight down from the heavens, in a decent, unhurrying way. Having six months to do it in, there is no occasion for haste or bluster. As to wet days being depressing here, they are not half so much so as in a city where one sees only wet muddy pavements and a black sea of bobbing umbrellas. Now, as this happens to be a rainy day, let me describe it to you. In the old stone fireplace pitchy pine knots are blazing like campaign torches, filling the big room with a ruddy glow. Outside are gray skies, falling rain, and sodden earth; but from a window here by my desk, I see the wet leaves of the orchard trees ablaze with color, and through this vista, just below, an old fence