15 



with such rapidity that you can notice it as you watch them. 

 Even in the daytime the colors and shadows are beautiful ; but 

 at sunrise and sunset the clouds 

 are often changed to gorgeous 

 banks of color. 



Watch the clouds and you will 

 be repaid ; look especially for 

 the great piles of clouds in the 

 east during the summer when 

 the sun is setting (Fig. lo). 

 Those lofty banks, tinged with 

 silver and gold, and rising, like 



mountains, thousands of feet 9-—^ ^ky flecked with clouds high 



til the dif. 

 into the air, are really made of 



bits of fog and mist. Among them vapor is still changing to 

 water and rain drops are forming, while violent currents are 

 whirling the drops about, and perhaps lifting them to such a 

 height that they are being frozen into hailstones. Far off 

 to the east, beneath that cloud, rain is falling in torrents, light- 

 ning is flashing and thunder crashing, though you cannot 

 hear it because it is so far away. 



You see the storm merely as a brightly lighted and beautifully 

 colored cloud mass in the sky ; but the people over whom it is 

 hanging find it a threatening black cloud, the source of a 

 furious wind, a heav}^ rain, and the awe-inspiring lighting. To 

 them it may not be beautiful, though grand in the extreme ; and so 



too, when the summer thunder 

 ■ . shower visits you in the early 



evening, you may know that 

 people to the west of you are 

 probably looking at its side and 

 top and admiring its beauty of 

 form and color. 



The storm passes on, still to 

 the eastward, and finally the 

 cloud mass entirely disappears beneath the eastern horizon ; but 

 if you watch, you will see signs that it is still there, though out 

 of sight ; for in the darkness of the night you can see the 



lo. — The cloud batiks of a thunder 

 storm on the horizon. 



