Part 6

Then one has not the gentleness and patience of Nature; we puddle the ground in our hurry, we seal it up and exclude the air, and the plants are worse off than before. When the sky is overcast and it is getting ready to rain, the moisture rises in the ground, the earth opens her pores and seconds the desire of the clouds.

Indeed, I have found there is but little virtue in a sprinkling-pot after the drought has reached a certain pitch. The soil will not absorb the water. 'Tis like throwing it on a hot stove. I once concentrated my efforts upon a single hill of corn and deluged it with water night and morning for several days, yet its leaves curled up and the ears failed the same as the rest. Something may be done, without doubt, if one begins in time, but the relief seems strangely inadequate to the means often used. In rainless countries good crops are produced by irrigation, but here man can imitate in a measure the patience and bounty of Nature, and, with night to aid him, can make his thirsty fields drink, or rather can pour the water down their throats.

I have said the rain is as necessary to man as to vegetation. You cannot have a rank, sappy race, like the English or the German, without plenty of moisture in the air and in the soil. Good viscera and an abundance of blood are closely related to meteorological conditions, unction of character, and a flow of animal spirits, too; and I suspect that much of the dry and rarefied humor of New England, as well as the thin and sharp physiognomies, are climatic results. We have rain enough, but not equability of temperature or moisture,--no steady, abundant supply of humidity in the air. In places in Great Britain it is said to rain on an average three days out of four the year through; yet the depth of rainfall is no greater than in this country, where it rains but the one day out of four. John Bull shows those three rainy days both in his temper and in his bodily habit; he is better for them in many ways, and perhaps not quite so good in a few others: they make him juicy and vascular, and maybe a little opaque; but we in this country could well afford a few of his negative qualities for the sake of his stomach and full-bloodedness.

We have such faith in the virtue of the rain, and in the capacity of the clouds to harbor and transport material good, that we more than half believe the stories of the strange and anomalous things that have fallen in showers. There is no credible report that it has ever yet rained pitchforks, but many other curious things have fallen. Fish, flesh, and fowl, and substances that were neither, have been picked up by veracious people after a storm. Manna, blood, and honey, frogs, newts, and fish-worms, are among the curious things the clouds are supposed to yield. If the clouds scooped up their water as the flying express train does, these phenomena could be easier explained. I myself have seen curious things. Riding along the road one day on the heels of a violent summer tempest, I saw the ground swarming with minute hopping creatures. I got out and captured my hands full. They proved to be tree-toads, many of them no larger than crickets, and none of them larger than a bumblebee. There seemed to be thousands of them. The mark of the tree-toad was the round, flattened ends of their toes. I took some of them home, but they died the next day. Where did they come from? I imagined the violent wind swept them off the trees in the woods to windward of the road. But this is only a guess; maybe they crept out of the ground, or from under the wall near by, and were out to wet their jackets.

I have never yet heard of a frog coming down chimney in a shower. Some circumstantial evidence may be pretty conclusive, Thoreau says, as when you find a trout in the milk; and if you find a frog or toad behind the fire-board immediately after a shower, you may well ask him to explain himself.

When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds were hollow and carried their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way, perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more compact: 'tis like the threads that issue from the mass of flax or roll of wool, only here there are innumerable threads, and the fingers that hold them never tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a humming it makes at times, and how the footsteps of the invisible spinner resound through the cloud-pillared chambers!

The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; and were they not constantly recruited from the atmosphere as the storm-centre travels along,--was new wool not forthcoming from the white sheep and the black sheep that the winds herd at every point,--all rains would be brief and local; the storm would quickly exhaust itself, as we sometimes see a thunder-cloud do in summer. A storm will originate in the far West or Southwest--those hatching-places of all our storms--and travel across the continent, and across the Atlantic to Europe, pouring down incalculable quantities of rain as it progresses and recruiting as it wastes. It is a moving vortex, into which the outlying moisture of the atmosphere is being constantly drawn and precipitated. It is not properly the storm that travels, but the low pressure, the storm impulse, the meteorological magnet that makes the storm wherever its presence may be. The clouds are not watering-carts, that are driven all the way from Arizona or Colorado to Europe, but growths, developments that spring up as the Storm-deity moves his wand across the land. In advance of the storm, you may often see the clouds grow; the condensation of the moisture into vapor is a visible process; slender, spiculæ-like clouds expand, deepen, and lengthen; in the rear of the low pressure, the reverse process, or the wasting of the clouds, may be witnessed. In summer, the recruiting of a thunder-storm is often very marked. I have seen the clouds file as straight across the sky toward a growing storm or thunder-head in the horizon as soldiers hastening to the point of attack or defense. They would grow more and more black and threatening as they advanced, and actually seemed to be driven by more urgent winds than certain other clouds. They were, no doubt, more in the line of the storm influence. All our general storms are cyclonic in their character, that is, rotary and progressive. Their type may be seen in every little whirlpool that goes down the swollen current of the river; and in our hemisphere they revolve in the same direction, namely, from right to left, or in opposition to the hands of a watch. When the water finds an outlet through the bottom of a dam, a suction or whirling vortex is developed that generally goes round in the same direction. A morning-glory or a hop-vine or a pole-bean winds around its support in the same course, and cannot be made to wind in any other. I am aware there are some perverse climbers among the plants that persist in going around the pole in the other direction. In the southern hemisphere the cyclone revolves in the other direction, or from left to right. How do they revolve at the equator, then? They do not revolve at all. This is the point of zero, and cyclones are never formed nearer than the third parallel of latitude. Whether hop-vines also refuse to wind about the pole there I am unable to say.

All our cyclones originate in the far Southwest and travel northeast. Why did we wait for the Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first appear from the general direction of the sunset? Who ever saw them pushing their opaque filaments over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we not have "northeasters" both winter and summer? True, but the storm does not come from that direction. In such a case we get that segment of the cyclonic whirl. A northeaster in one place may be an easter, a norther, or a souther in some other locality. See through those drifting, drenching clouds that come hurrying out of the northeast, and there are the boss-clouds above them, the great captains themselves, moving serenely on in the opposite direction.

Electricity is, of course, an important agent in storms. It is the great organizer and ring-master. How a clap of thunder will shake down the rain! It gives the clouds a smart rap; it jostles the vapor so that the particles fall together more quickly; it makes the drops let go in double and treble ranks. Nature likes to be helped in that way,--likes to have the water agitated when she is freezing it or heating it, and the clouds smitten when she is compressing them into rain. So does a shock of surprise quicken the pulse in man, and in the crisis of action help him to a decision.

What a spur and impulse the summer shower is! How its coming quickens and hurries up the slow, jogging country life! The traveler along the dusty road arouses from his reverie at the warning rumble behind the hills; the children hasten from the field or from the school; the farmer steps lively and thinks fast. In the hay-field, at the first signal-gun of the elements, what a commotion! How the horserake rattles, how the pitchforks fly, how the white sleeves play and twinkle in the sun or against the dark background of the coming storm! One man does the work of two or three. It is a race with the elements, and the hay-makers do not like to be beaten. The rain that is life to the grass when growing is poison to it after it becomes cured hay, and it must be got under shelter, or put up into snug cocks, if possible, before the storm overtakes it.

The rains of winter are cold and odorless. One prefers the snow, which warms and covers; but can there be anything more delicious than the first warm April rain,--the first offering of the softened and pacified clouds of spring? The weather has been dry, perhaps, for two or three weeks; we have had a touch of the dreaded drought thus early; the roads are dusty, the streams again shrunken, and forest fires send up columns of smoke on every hand; the frost has all been out of the ground many days; the snow has all disappeared from the mountains; the sun is warm, but the grass does not grow, nor the early seeds come up. The quickening spirit of the rain is needed. Presently the wind gets in the southwest, and, late in the day, we have our first vernal shower, gentle and leisurely, but every drop condensed from warm tropic vapors and charged with the very essence of spring. Then what a perfume fills the air! One's nostrils are not half large enough to take it in. The smoke, washed by the rain, becomes the breath of woods, and the soil and the newly plowed fields give out an odor that dilates the sense. How the buds of the trees swell, how the grass greens, how the birds rejoice! Hear the robins laugh! This will bring out the worms and the insects, and start the foliage of the trees. A summer shower has more copiousness and power, but this has the charm of freshness and of all first things.

The laws of storms, up to a certain point, have come to be pretty well understood, but there is yet no science of the weather, any more than there is of human nature. There is about as much room for speculation in the one case as in the other. The causes and agencies are subtle and obscure, and we shall, perhaps, have the metaphysics of the subject before we have the physics.

But as there are persons who can read human nature pretty well, so there are those who can read the weather.

It is a masculine subject, and quite beyond the province of woman. Ask those who spend their time in the open air,--the farmer, the sailor, the soldier, the walker; ask the birds, the beasts, the tree-toads: they know, if they will only tell. The farmer diagnoses the weather daily, as the doctor a patient: he feels the pulse of the wind; he knows when the clouds have a scurfy tongue, or when the cuticle of the day is feverish and dry, or soft and moist. Certain days he calls "weather-breeders," and they are usually the fairest days in the calendar,--all sun and sky. They are too fair; they are suspiciously so. They come in the fall and spring, and always mean mischief. When a day of almost unnatural brightness and clearness in either of these seasons follows immediately after a storm, it is a sure indication that another storm follows close,--follows to-morrow. In keeping with this fact is the rule of the barometer, that, if the mercury suddenly rises very high, the fair weather will not last. It is a high peak that indicates a corresponding depression close at hand. I observed one of these angelic mischief-makers during the past October. The second day after a heavy fall of rain was the fairest of the fair,--not a speck or film in all the round of the sky. Where have all the clouds and vapors gone to so suddenly? was my mute inquiry, but I suspected they were plotting together somewhere behind the horizon. The sky was a deep ultramarine blue; the air so transparent that distant objects seemed near, and the afternoon shadows were sharp and clear. At night the stars were unusually numerous and bright (a sure sign of an approaching storm). The sky was laid bare, as the tidal wave empties the shore of its water before it heaps it up upon it. A violent storm of wind and rain the next day followed this delusive brightness. So the weather, like human nature, may be suspiciously transparent. A saintly day may undo you. A few clouds do not mean rain; but when there are absolutely none, when even the haze and filmy vapors are suppressed or held back, then beware.

Then the weather-wise know there are two kinds of clouds, rain-clouds and wind-clouds, and that the latter are always the most portentous. In summer they are black as night; they look as if they would blot out the very earth. They raise a great dust, and set things flying and slamming for a moment, and that is all. They are the veritable wind-bags of Æolus. There is something in the look of rain-clouds that is unmistakable,--a firm, gray, tightly woven look that makes you remember your umbrella. Not too high nor too low, not black nor blue, but the form and hue of wet, unbleached linen. You see the river water in them; they are heavy-laden, and move slow. Sometimes they develop what are called "mares' tails,"--small cloud-forms here and there against a heavy background, that look like the stroke of a brush, or the streaming tail of a charger. Sometimes a few under-clouds will be combed and groomed by the winds or other meteoric agencies at work, as if for a race. I have seen coming storms develop well-defined vertebræ,--a long backbone of cloud, with the articulations and processes clearly marked. Any of these forms, changing, growing, denote rain, because they show unusual agencies at work. The storm is brewing and fermenting. "See those cowlicks," said an old farmer, pointing to certain patches on the clouds; "they mean rain." Another time, he said the clouds were "making bag," had growing udders, and that it would rain before night, as it did. This reminded me that the Orientals speak of the clouds as cows which the winds herd and milk.

In the winter, we see the sun wading in snow. The morning has perhaps been clear, but in the afternoon a bank of gray filmy or cirrus cloud meets him in the west, and he sinks deeper and deeper into it, till, at his going down, his muffled beams are entirely hidden. Then, on the morrow, not

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,"

but silent as night, the white legions are here.

The old signs seldom fail,--a red and angry sunrise, or flushed clouds at evening. Many a hope of rain have I seen dashed by a painted sky at sunset. There is truth in the old couplet, too:--

"If it rains before seven, It will clear before eleven."

An old Indian had a sign for winter: "If the wind blows the snow off the trees, the next storm will be snow; if it rains off, the next storm will be rain."

Morning rains are usually short-lived. Better wait till ten o'clock.

When the clouds are chilled, they turn blue and rise up.

When the fog leaves the mountains, reaching upward, as if afraid of being left behind, the fair weather is near.

Shoddy clouds are of little account, and soon fall to pieces. Have your clouds show a good strong fibre, and have them lined,--not with silver, but with other clouds of a finer texture,--and have them wadded. It wants two or three thicknesses to get up a good rain. Especially, unless you have that cloud-mother, that dim, filmy, nebulous mass that has its root in the higher regions of the air, and is the source and backing of all storms, your rain will be light indeed.

I fear my reader's jacket is not thoroughly soaked yet. I must give him a final dash, a "clear-up" shower.

We were encamping in the primitive woods, by a little trout lake which the mountain carried high on his hip, like a soldier's canteen. There were wives in the party, curious to know what the lure was that annually drew their husbands to the woods. That magical writing on a trout's back they would fain decipher, little heeding the warning that what is written here is not given to woman to know.

Our only tent or roof was the sheltering arms of the great birches and maples. What was sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose, too, so the goose insisted. A luxurious couch of boughs upon springing poles was prepared, and the night should be not less welcome than the day, which had indeed been idyllic. (A trout dinner had been served by a little spring brook, upon an improvised table covered with moss and decked with ferns, with strawberries from a near clearing.)