d frequently with snow. On the latitude of 41 deg. heavy
snow-storms are not uncommon in April. Within the last fifteen years two
such have occurred after the 10th of the month. April, as we have seen,
should be cool and moist. If dry, the early crops are endangered by a
spring drouth; if very wet, there is danger of an extreme northern
transit, and an early summer drouth. It is emphatically true that

"April and May are the keys of the year."

Its distinguishing peculiar feature is the gentle, _warm_, _trade_
rains--"_April showers_"--which, in the absence of great magnetic
irritability, that current drops upon us. There is great _mean_ magnetic
activity, but it is not so _irregularly excessive_ as in March.

May, in our climate, should be, and normally is, a wet month, and a cool
one, considering the altitude of the sun. The atmospheric machinery which
the sun moves is, however, ordinarily about six weeks behind it--the
latter reaching the tropic the 20th of June, and the former its farthest
northern extension about six weeks later. Hence it is not a cause for
alarm if May be wet and cool. The great staples, wheat, grass, and oats,
are benefited; and corn, according to the proverb, will not be seriously
retarded. The movable belt of excessive magneto-electric action, with its
tropical electric rains, so exciting to vegetation, and its periods or
terms of excessive heat, is on its way north, and sure to arrive in
season, and remain long enough to mature the corn. There have been but two
seasons in this century when corn did not mature in the latitude of 41 deg..
One during the cold decade, and the cold part of it, between 1815 and
1820; and the other, during the cold half of the fourth decade, between
1835 and 1840.

The distinguishing feature, if there be one, of May, is its long, and, for
the season, cool storms. These have, in different localities, different
names. In pastoral sections we hear of the "_sheep storms_"--those which
effect the sheep severely when newly shorn--killing them or reducing them
in flesh by their coldness and severity.

In relation to this too early shearing, there is an old English proverb,
in "Forster's Collection," viz.:

"Shear your sheep in May,
And you will shear them all away."

So there are others called "_Quaker storms_," which occur about the time
when that estimable sect hold their yearly meeting. And there are other
names given in different localities to these long sp