IS IT GOING TO RAIN? 79 



When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds 

 were hollow and carried their water as in a cask, be- 

 cause 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. AMien fair Aveather is in the ascendant, the 

 clouds are simply reabsorbed by the air; but when 

 it rains they are spun off into something more com- 

 pact: 'tis like the threads that issue from the mass 

 of flax or roU of wool, only here there are innumer- 

 able threads and the fingers that hold them never 

 tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a hum- 

 ming it makes at times, and how the footsteps of 

 the invisible spinner resound through the cloud-pil- 

 lared chambers! 



The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; 

 and were they not constantly recruited from the at- 

 mosphere 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 con- 

 tinent, 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 



