專四晨讀美文：A Wet Sunday in a Country Inn

A Wet Sunday in a Country Inn
A wet Sunday in a country inn!
Whoever has had the luck to experience one
can alone judge of my situation.
The rain pattered against the casements;
the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound.
I went to the windows in quest of something to amuse the eye;
but it seemed as if I had been placed completely
out of the reach of all amusement.
The windows of my bed-room
looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys,
while those of my sitting-room
commanded a full view of the stable yard.
I know of nothing more calculated
to make a man sick of this world
than a stable yard on a rainy day.
The place was littered with wet straw
that had been kicked about by travelers and stable-boys.
In one corner was a stagnant pool of water,
surrounding an island of muck;
there were several half-drowned fowls
crowded together under a cart,
among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock,
drenched out of all life and spirit;
his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather,
along which the water trickled from his back;
near the cart was a halfdozing cow, chewing her cud,
and standing patiently be rained on,
with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide;
a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable,
was poking his spectral headset of a window,
with the rain dripping on it from the eaves;
an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by,
uttered something every now and then
between a bark and a yelp;
a drab of a kitchen wench tramped backwards and forwards
through the yard in patens,
looking as sulky as the weather itself;
everything, in short, was comfortless and forlorn,
excepting a crew of hardened ducks,
assembled like boon companions round a puddle
and making a riotous noise over their liquor.