WEATHER SUPERSTITIONS 107 



if they come within three days before or three days 

 after a change of the moon, the influence of the moon 

 is well established. 



It is when the purely human divisions of time are 

 made arbiters of the weather that the science of 

 weather lore falls into purest superstition. Thus 

 a wet Friday is commonly held to foretell a wet 

 Sunday, though, to do him justice, the rustic makes 

 fun of himself by adding, " Wet Sunday, wet all the 

 week." It would follow that once we got a wet 

 Friday or a wet Sunday we should never have a fine 

 day again. The conventional day added to the 

 established order of the moon gives one of the most 

 pessimistic of all weather predictions, and one which 

 in the experience of the writer is as firmly held as 

 any. It runs : 



" Saturday's new and Sunday's full, 

 Never was dry and never 'ull." 



There is no corresponding dead-certainty prediction 

 of a month's fine weather. Some might hold that 

 this is a sign of pessimism in the countryman, but 

 it easily bears another significance. Normal weather 

 is fine that is, good for crops and man and beast. 

 In fact, the very word weather means bad weather 

 in common American parlance, whither it went, no 

 doubt, from Puritan England. In this sense, if there 

 were no weather at all, we should do very well. 

 April showers are not weather, though April blizzards 

 are. A wet day after mangold planting is not weather, 

 but a wet day when the hay is ready to cart would 

 undoubtedly rank as such. If we can get our rules 

 of bad weather, the good weather will take care of 



