ir. You know how big
some of them are when you happen to get a grain in your eye! Viscosity
has a lot to do with it, too.

"The light of the sun is a bluish-white, like some of the blue stars.
White, as you remember from the rainbow, is just a mixture of all sorts
of colors and the different colors are created by waves of light, some
being shorter and others longer. A long wave, like the red, will pass
around a tiny piece of dust, but a short wave, like the blue, will be
stopped by it, and scattered, sometimes polarized, as it is called, or
turned into one plane."

"I don't think I quite see that," said Anton.

"It's a little complicated," the Weather Man answered, "but maybe I can
give you an idea of it. Suppose you were on a big steamboat in a choppy
sea. As the steamer's length would extend over several of these waves,
none of them would be big enough to make the vessel heave. If you were
on that same choppy sea in a small canoe, you would be tossed in every
direction. Now, if you think of the long red wave of light as a steamer
and the blue as a canoe, you can see that in a ripple of small particles
of dust the blue is going to be more affected than the red. In other
words, the blue will be scattered. It will be diffused all over the sky
and the light that comes through will be less blue."

"Then I should think the sun would look red," said Anton.

"It does," the Forecaster explained, "when there's a fog, which simply
means, when there's more obstruction in the air. Sunlight is never
white, as you know, it's yellow-white and the golden effect is due to
dust. It's the same way at sunset. Then the rays of the sun which reach
you pass through a larger amount of air, because you're looking at them
from an angle, so they have to strike more grains of dust, and more of
the blue rays are scattered. Then, too, when the sun, at sunset is, to
you, shining obliquely on the atmosphere, it is passing through several
layers of air and these bend the rays differently."

"I still don't see," said the author of the sunset-color article, "why
there should be so much pink, or rose-color, and why the clouds should
generally be pink."

"There's not much pink in a clear sky," the Forecaster answered, "and as
for the pink clouds, you've never seen them in the west when the sun was
still above the horizon, have you?"

"No--no," said the other, "I don't think so. The pink generally comes
after the sun had disappeared."

"Scientif