IV

IS IT GOING TO RAIN?

I suspect that, like most countrymen, I was born with a chronic anxiety
about the weather. Is it going to rain or snow, be hot or cold, wet or
dry?--are inquiries upon which I would fain get the views of every man
I meet, and I find that most men are fired with the same desire to get
my views upon the same set of subjects. To a countryman the weather
means something,--to a farmer especially. The farmer has sowed and
planted and reaped and vended nothing but weather all his life. The
weather must lift the mortgage on his farm, and pay his taxes, and feed
and clothe his family. Of what use is his labor unless seconded by the
weather? Hence there is speculation in his eye whenever he looks at the
clouds, or the moon, or the sunset, or the stars; for even the Milky
Way, in his view, may point the direction of the wind to-morrow, and
hence is closely related to the price of butter. He may not take the
sage's advice to "hitch his wagon to a star," but he pins his hopes to
the moon, and plants and sows by its phases.

Then the weather is that phase of Nature in which she appears not the
immutable fate we are so wont to regard her, but on the contrary
something quite human and changeable, not to say womanish,--a creature
of moods, of caprices, of cross purposes; gloomy and downcast to-day,
and all light and joy to-morrow; caressing and tender one moment, and
severe and frigid the next; one day iron, the next day vapor;
inconsistent, inconstant, incalculable; full of genius, full of folly,
full of extremes; to be read and understood, not by rule, but by subtle
signs and indirections,--by a look, a glance, a presence, as we read
and understand a man or a woman. Some days are like a rare poetic mood.