r said,
approvingly.

"What could the rest of us do?" asked an alert youngster. "I haven't a
printing-press, or a wireless apparatus or anything else."

"Nor have I," said two or three voices.

The Forecaster looked quickly at Ross. This was a crucial point. It was
Anton who answered.

"You've got plenty of wind at your place, Lee, haven't you?" he asked.

The lad laughed.

"Pop says it's the windiest place in the county," he answered, "poked
right up there on the top of that knoll."

"You ought to be the official wind-measurer," the crippled lad declared.
"There is a way to measure wind, isn't there, Mr. Levin?"

"Certainly," the Forecaster answered, "it's a very necessary thing to
do, too."

"Pete's camera!" interjected the laconic Bob.

"What's the good of that?" broke in its owner. "You can't snap-shot the
wind, at least not that I've ever seen."

"Clouds!" said Bob.

"That's right," agreed Anton, "you could photograph the clouds, Pete.
Suppose you took a snap-shot of the sky every day, at the same time, for
a year, it would make a peach of a series."

"The Bureau at Washington would be glad of a series like that," put in
the Forecaster. "So far as that's concerned, Pete, I'd buy a daily print
for my own use. I couldn't pay much, of course, but enough to meet the
cost of materials."

Pete brightened up.

"I'll do that, quicker'n a wink," he said. "I've snapshotted about
everything else around here, but I never thought of the sky."

"You could tackle eclipses and halos and rainbows and lightning--all
sorts of things," suggested Anton.

"Right-o!" answered Pete, "you can put me down as official
photographer."

"I don't see," said one of the smaller lads, "where that rain-gauge is
so hard to make. I'll make one and put it up at my place."

"Dad's got an old barometer," suggested another, "that he used to have
when he was a steamboat skipper. I'm sure he'd let me have it. It's in
the attic now, where nobody looks at it."

"Some of us might measure the amount of sunshine," said Ross. "Isn't
there some way of doing that, Mr. Levin?"

"Indeed there is," the Forecaster replied. "Why, in some places, they
run machinery by sunshine. There is a big solar engine at Pasadena, in
California, where they pump water and irrigate an orchard just by an
arrangement of mirrors. Even a small one would run quite a good-sized
engine."

"Gimme that! Oh, gimme that!" burst in another of the boys, who had been
p