94 MARCH 



4- 



An Australian, new to this island, asked me a few days 

 after landing, whether we often had &quot; clouds like those.&quot; 

 I looked up and saw the daily but, to most of us, never 

 stale spectacle of clouds following one another across 

 the sky like newly-dipped sheep across a meadow, or 

 fishing smacks across the bay. The usual south-west 

 wind was their shepherd dog and the pen doubtless lay 

 somewhere on the other side of the easterly ridge topped 

 by elm trees, behind which they galloped out of sight 

 singly and in little groups. Each hurried, though vainly, 

 to get in front of its neighbour : &quot; The clouds the clouds 

 chase,&quot; said George Meredith in the daintiest and com- 

 pletest of his lyrics ; and that is a game no poet and few 

 countrymen can watch without a pleasure that may 

 amount almost to excitement. No one, of course not 

 even Aristophanes was quite such a devotee of the 

 pastime of cloud-watching as Shelley. His head was 

 among them ; and their praises poured from his lips. 

 But most countrymen are &quot; cloud-wise.&quot; 



Now different countries may reasonably boast of 

 atmospheric pictures distinctive of their clime. I have 

 lately come from an island where it did not rain at all 

 during my stay, but it was seldom that we were out of 

 sight of a rainbow or a bit of a rainbow. Dim across the 

 sea were half-revealed and half-concealed the high cliffs 

 of a desert island. They drew mist and cloud, and 

 within the film was held, like a flower in a spider s web, 

 a perpetual broken shaft of purple, green and orange. 

 It looked almost straight and vertical, not very greatly 

 varying either in length or brilliance. One came to 

 regard it as a settled feature of the sea and landscape, 

 &quot; A rainbow s arch stood on the sea/ 



