WEATHER AND THE SKY 201 



Yet those of us who dwell in the open have our pride, 

 too, and our pity for those who do not know how the 

 firmament showeth His handiwork; those to whom the 

 simple question, "Well, what's it going to do to- 

 morrow?" is not fraught with profound importance. 



In the old days before the Government took a hand 

 at prophecy and gave its weather reports each day to 

 the papers, every rural community boasted its own 

 "weather prophet," who read the heavens for signs and 

 very often displayed an uncanny shrewdness in pre- 

 diction. Such a one was Levi Beebe, who lived on 

 Beartown Mountain in western Massachusetts and 

 whose fame is still perpetuated by a tablet beside the 

 Berkshire County street railroad. These old-time 

 prophets shared, of course, in the common weather 

 lore of the countryside, some of it borrowed from 

 the Indians, some of it no doubt brought from England 

 by the early colonists, but still more of it the slow ac- 

 cumulation of rural American observers. Not a little 

 of it persists to this day, and the farther back you get 

 into the country, the larger it bulks in the speech, even 

 in the belief of the natives. Was there ever an Ameri- 

 can boy who did not learn that, 



Mackerel sky 



Never leaves the earth dry? 



Is there a country child, even to-day, who does not 

 hope to see the new moon over his right shoulder, which 



