rm is often very
marked. I have seen the clouds file as straight across the sky toward a
growing storm or thunder-head in the horizon as soldiers hastening to
the point of attack or defense. They would grow more and more black and
threatening as they advanced, and actually seemed to be driven by more
urgent winds than certain other clouds. They were, no doubt, more in
the line of the storm influence. All our general storms are cyclonic in
their character, that is, rotary and progressive. Their type may be
seen in every little whirlpool that goes down the swollen current of
the river; and in our hemisphere they revolve in the same direction,
namely, from right to left, or in opposition to the hands of a watch.
When the water finds an outlet through the bottom of a dam, a suction
or whirling vortex is developed that generally goes round in the same
direction. A morning-glory or a hop-vine or a pole-bean winds around
its support in the same course, and cannot be made to wind in any
other. I am aware there are some perverse climbers among the plants
that persist in going around the pole in the other direction. In the
southern hemisphere the cyclone revolves in the other direction, or
from left to right. How do they revolve at the equator, then? They do
not revolve at all. This is the point of zero, and cyclones are never
formed nearer than the third parallel of latitude. Whether hop-vines
also refuse to wind about the pole there I am unable to say.

All our cyclones originate in the far Southwest and travel northeast.
Why did we wait for the Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all
the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first appear from the
general direction of the sunset? Who ever saw them pushing their opaque
filaments over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we not have
"northeasters" both winter and summer? True, but the storm does not
come from that direction. In such a case we get that segment of the
cyclonic whirl. A northeaster in one place may be an easter, a norther,
or a souther in some other locality. See through those drifting,
drenching clouds that come hurrying out of the northeast, and there are
the boss-clouds above them, the great captains themselves, moving
serenely on in the opposite direction.

Electricity is, of course, an important agent in storms. It is the
great organizer and ring-master. How a clap of thunder will shake down
the rain! It gives the clouds a smart rap; it jostle