you find a trout in the milk; and if you find a frog or toad behind the
fire-board immediately after a shower, you may well ask him to explain
himself.

When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds were hollow and carried
their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds
bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way,
perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the
barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a
distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When
fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by
the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more
compact: 'tis like the threads that issue from the mass of flax or
roll of wool, only here there are innumerable threads, and the fingers
that hold them never tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a
humming it makes at times, and how the footsteps of the invisible
spinner resound through the cloud-pillared chambers!

The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; and were they not
constantly recruited from the atmosphere as the storm-centre travels
along,--was new wool not forthcoming from the white sheep and the black
sheep that the winds herd at every point,--all rains would be brief and
local; the storm would quickly exhaust itself, as we sometimes see a
thunder-cloud do in summer. A storm will originate in the far West or
Southwest--those hatching-places of all our storms--and travel across
the continent, and across the Atlantic to Europe, pouring down
incalculable quantities of rain as it progresses and recruiting as it
wastes. It is a moving vortex, into which the outlying moisture of the
atmosphere is being constantly drawn and precipitated. It is not
properly the storm that travels, but the low pressure, the storm
impulse, the meteorological magnet that makes the storm wherever its
presence may be. The clouds are not watering-carts, that are driven all
the way from Arizona or Colorado to Europe, but growths, developments
that spring up as the Storm-deity moves his wand across the land. In
advance of the storm, you may often see the clouds grow; the
condensation of the moisture into vapor is a visible process; slender,
spiculae-like clouds expand, deepen, and lengthen; in the rear of the
low pressure, the reverse process, or the wasting of the clouds, may be
witnessed. In summer, the recruiting of a thunder-sto