AN IDLE AFTERNOON 



I HAVE heard of a man who invariably begins 

 his letters, whether of friendship or business, 

 with a bulletin of the day's weather : it rains, or 

 it shines ; it is cold or warm ; and to my way of 

 thinking it is far from certain that the custom is 

 not commendable. It is fair to sender and re- 

 ceiver alike that the mental conditions under 

 which an epistle is written should be understood ; 

 and there is no man or no ordinary man, such 

 as most of us have the happiness to deal with 

 whose thoughts and language are not more or 

 less colored by those skyey influences the sum 

 of which we designate by the interrogative name 

 of weather. I say "interrogative," because I 

 assume, although, having no dictionary by me, 

 I cannot verify the assumption, that the word 

 " weather " is only a corruption or variant of the 

 older word " whether ; " the thing itself being 

 an entity so variable and doubtful that remarks 

 about it fall naturally, and almost of necessity, 

 into a discussion of probabilities, in other words, 

 of " whether." 



As to the weather here in Tucson, I could fill 



