THE EARTH-CLOUD 



cross between cirrus and cumulus (cirro-cumulus) 

 there are endless varieties in form and texture, never 

 quite the same for more than a few minutes at 

 a stretch, even in the dead calm of sundown, and 

 never the same twice. 



For fantasies, the clouds are like the clear, 

 glowing fire of the December night. Poring into 

 them, we can see images of strange creatures horned 

 and finned, gargoyles, broken and strewn statues, 

 odds and ends of ogres and giants ; with distant 

 rolling downs and peaks and tumbled fragments of 

 mountains, these last chiefly in the piled-up creamy 

 masses of cumulus, that day-cloud which we may 

 see in fine weather at any season, but most in 

 summer blue. 



There is a cloud, however, of which the way- 

 farer at dusk in marshy and in wide-meadowed 

 places has seen much lately, one that, contrary to 

 cloud custom, has little metamorphosis. This is 

 stratus, essentially the earth-cloud, which, from the 

 places where it so often floats, I have called the 

 wraith of the river night. Stratus floats at all times 

 of the year, provided only the sky is clear of other 

 clouds and the air is still. Over the chalk streams 

 I have watched it form at sundown in the height of 

 summer, and at its cold wreathing every trout ceases 

 to dimple the face of the stream, though hundreds 

 were eagerly taking flies a minute earlier. Stratus, 

 in such places, forms perhaps through the air over 

 the water mixing with the chillier air over the earth : 

 though why this should cause the trout to cease 



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