IS IT GOING TO RAIN? 83 



place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. 

 When the east is burning up, the west is generally 

 drowning out. The weather, we say, is always in 

 extremes ; it never rains but it pours ; but this is 

 only the abuse of a law on the part of the elements 

 which is at the bottom of all the life and motion 

 on the globe. 



The rain itself comes in shorter or longer waves 

 now fast, now slow and sometimes in regular 

 throbs or pulse-beats. The fall and winter rains are, 

 as a rule, the most deliberate and general, but the 

 spring and summer rains are always more or less im- 

 pulsive and capricious. One may see the rain stalk- 

 ing across the hills or coming up the valley in single 

 file as it were. Another time it moves in vast masses 

 or solid columns, with broad open spaces between. 

 I have seen a spring snow-storm lasting nearly all 

 day that swept down in rapid intermittent sheets' or 

 gusts. The waves or pulsations of the storm were 

 nearly vertical and were very marked. 



But the great fact about the rain is that it is the 

 most beneficent of all the operations of nature ; more 

 immediately than sunlight even, it means life and 

 growth. Moisture is the Eve of the physical world, 

 the soft teeming principle given to wife to Adam or 

 heat, and the mother of all that lives. Sunshine 

 abounds everywhere, but only where the rain or dew 

 follows is there life. The earth had the sun long 

 before it had the humid cloud, and will doubtless 

 continue to have it after the last drop of moisture 



