rizon, as if
there were a diurnal aurora streaming up and burning through the
sunlight; smoke from the first spring fires rising up in various
directions,--a day that winnowed the air, and left no film in the sky.
At night, how the big March bellows did work! Venus was like a great
lamp in the sky. The stars all seemed brighter than usual, as if the
wind blew them up like burning coals. Venus actually seemed to flare
in the wind.

Each day foretells the next, if one could read the signs; to-day is
the progenitor of to-morrow. When the atmosphere is telescopic, and
distant objects stand out unusually clear and sharp, a storm is near.
We are on the crest of the wave, and the depression follows quickly.
It often happens that clouds are not so indicative of a storm as the
total absence of clouds. In this state of the atmosphere the stars are
unusually numerous and bright at night, which is also a bad omen.

I find this observation confirmed by Humboldt. "It appears," he says,
"that the transparency of the air is prodigiously increased when a
certain quantity of water is uniformly diffused through it." Again, he
says that the mountaineers of the Alps "predict a change of weather
when, the air being calm, the Alps covered with perpetual snow seem on
a sudden to be nearer the observer, and their outlines are marked with
great distinctness on the azure sky." He further observes that the
same condition of the atmosphere renders distant sounds more audible.

There is one redness in the east in the morning that means storm,
another that means wind. The former is broad, deep, and angry; the
clouds look like a huge bed of burning coals just raked open; the
latter is softer, more vapory, and more widely extended. Just at the
point where the sun is going to rise, and some minutes in advance of
his coming, there sometimes rises straight upward a rosy column; it is
like a shaft of deeply dyed vapor, blending with and yet partly
separated from the clouds, and the base of which presently comes to
glow like the sun itself. The day that follows is pretty certain to be
very windy. At other times the under sides of the eastern clouds are
all turned to pink or rose-colored wool; the transformation extends
until nearly the whole sky flushes, even the west glowing slightly;
the sign is always to be interpreted as meaning fair weather.

The approach of great storms is seldom heralded by any striking or
unusual phenomenon. The real weather god