a bitterly cold wind would spring up, and both would keep
on steadily for the whole day, and we would come home with colds and
rheumatism all over us, and go to bed.

The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether. I never can
understand it. The barometer is useless: it is as misleading as the
newspaper forecast.

There was one hanging up in a hotel at Oxford at which I was staying last
spring, and, when I got there, it was pointing to "set fair." It was
simply pouring with rain outside, and had been all day; and I couldn't
quite make matters out. I tapped the barometer, and it jumped up and
pointed to "very dry." The Boots stopped as he was passing, and said he
expected it meant to-morrow. I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the
week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not.

I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the
rain came down faster than ever. On Wednesday I went and hit it again,
and the pointer went round towards "set fair," "very dry," and "much
heat," until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further. It
tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy
fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself. It
evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine,
and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it,
and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very
dry."

Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of
the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.

Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a prolonged spell of
grand weather _some time_, and read out a poem which was printed over the
top of the oracle, about

"Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past."

The fine weather never came that summer. I expect that machine must have
been referring to the following spring.

Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones. I
never can make head or tail of those. There is one side for 10 a.m.
yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get
there as early as ten, you know. It rises or falls for rain and fine,
with much or less wind, and one end is "Nly" and the other "Ely" (what's
Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn't tell you anything.
And you've got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit,
and eve