nd wind-measurers, like my anemometer?" queried Tom.

"Yes," the Forecaster agreed with a smile, "and some of them have
devices that make a continuous record of wind velocity."

"And barometers like mine?" put in one of the younger boys, not to be
outdone.

"Various forms of barometers, and barographs, and thermographs, and
sunshine recorders and all sorts of things. Some of them even have
seismographs, which tell of every tiny little earthquake, that may be
going on all over the world. You know, boys, there's hardly an hour of
the day that there isn't a small earthquake, somewhere, and there are
really quite sizeable earthquakes at least once a month. A
well-equipped weather office is quite a complicated affair, and it takes
well-trained men to conduct the observations and interpret them
properly."

"All those observations are sent to Washington, aren't they, sir?"
queried Anton. "Just as I send mine every night to Bob, for him to
transmit by wireless."

"Just the same way," the Forecaster answered, "except that they're all
sent in cipher, of course. Once in a while the cipher results in some
queer combinations. The regular routine requires that an observer send
the temperature, the barometric pressure of the atmosphere, the amount
of rain or snow, the direction and force of the wind, the state of the
weather, the types of clouds and the highest and lowest temperature
since the last observation. I remember once, while at the Milwaukee
station, we got the following message from La Crosse, Wisconsin:

"'Cross All My Ink Frozen'

"It so happened that we had Charlie Cross working at that station at
that time, but the message did not apply to him, nor, for that matter,
to his ink. On second consideration and reading, the message read very
differently. 'Cross' was the code name of the station; 'All' meant that
his barometer read 30.02 and that his morning temperature was zero; 'My'
conveyed the information that his sky was clear, the wind from the south
and that his minimum temperature for the night was zero; 'Ink' informed
us that the wind velocity at the station was six miles an hour and that
he could not add the usual height of the water in the Mississippi as the
river was 'frozen.' Similar code messages are sent in twice a day from
each of the two hundred stations.

"So you see, Mr. Tighe, if all these various observations combine to
describe a certain weather type, if we can check up the accuracy by
comparison