A^ IDLE AFTEENOON 



I HAVE heard of a man who invariably begins 

 his letters, whether of friendship or business, 

 with a bulletin of the day's weather : it rains, or 

 it shines ; it is cold or warm ; and to my way of 

 thinking it is far from certain that the custom is 

 not conmiendable. It is fair to sender and re- 

 ceiver alike that the mental conditions under 

 which an epistle is written should be understood ; 

 and there is no man — or no ordinary man, such 

 as most of us have the happiness to deal with — 

 whose thoughts and language are not more or 

 less colored by those skyey influences the sxmi 

 of which we designate by the interrogative name 

 of weather. I say "interrogative," because I 

 assume, although, having no dictionary by me, 

 I cannot verify the assumption, that the word 

 " weather " is only a corruption or variant of the 

 older word " whether ; " the thing itself being 

 an entity so variable and doubtful that remarks 

 about it fall naturally, and almost of necessity, 

 into a discussion of probabilities, in other words, 

 of " whether." 



As to the weather here in Tucson, I could fill 



