in waves. There is always a preponderance one way or the other; always
"a steep inequality." Down this incline the rain comes, and up the
other side it goes. The high barometer travels like the crest of a sea,
and the low barometer like the trough. When the scale kicks the beam in
one place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. When the east
is burning up, the west is generally drowning out. The weather, we say,
is always in extremes; it never rains but it pours: but this is only
the abuse of a law on the part of the elements which is at the bottom
of all the life and motion on the globe.

The rain itself comes in shorter or longer waves,--now fast, now slow--
and sometimes in regular throbs or pulse-beats. The fall and winter
rains are, as a rule, the most deliberate and general, but the spring
and summer rains are always more or less impulsive and capricious. One
may see the rain stalking across the hills or coming up the valley in
single file, as it were. Another time it moves in vast masses or solid
columns, with broad open spaces between. I have seen a spring snowstorm
lasting nearly all day that swept down in rapid intermittent sheets or
gusts. The waves or pulsations of the storm were nearly vertical and
were very marked. But the great fact about the rain is that it is the
most beneficent of all the operations of nature; more immediately than
sunlight even, it means life and growth. Moisture is the Eve of the
physical world, the soft teeming principle given to wife to Adam or
heat, and the mother of all that lives. Sunshine abounds everywhere,
but only where the rain or dew follows is there life. The earth had the
sun long before it had the humid cloud, and will doubtless continue to
have it after the last drop of moisture has perished or been
dissipated. The moon has sunshine enough, but no rain; hence it is a
dead world--a lifeless cinder. It is doubtless true that certain of the
planets, as Saturn and Jupiter, have not yet reached the condition of