gentle and leisurely, but every drop condensed from warm tropic vapors
and charged with the very essence of spring. Then what a perfume fills
the air! One's nostrils are not half large enough to take it in. The
smoke, washed by the rain, becomes the breath of woods, and the soil
and the newly plowed fields give out an odor that dilates the sense.
How the buds of the trees swell, how the grass greens, how the birds
rejoice! Hear the robins laugh! This will bring out the worms and the
insects, and start the foliage of the trees. A summer shower has more
copiousness and power, but this has the charm of freshness and of all
first things.

The laws of storms, up to a certain point, have come to be pretty well
understood, but there is yet no science of the weather, any more than
there is of human nature. There is about as much room for speculation
in the one case as in the other. The causes and agencies are subtle and
obscure, and we shall, perhaps, have the metaphysics of the subject
before we have the physics.

But as there are persons who can read human nature pretty well, so
there are those who can read the weather.

It is a masculine subject, and quite beyond the province of woman. Ask
those who spend their time in the open air,--the farmer, the sailor,
the soldier, the walker; ask the birds, the beasts, the tree-toads:
they know, if they will only tell. The farmer diagnoses the weather
daily, as the doctor a patient: he feels the pulse of the wind; he
knows when the clouds have a scurfy tongue, or when the cuticle of the
day is feverish and dry, or soft and moist. Certain days he calls
"weather-breeders," and they are usually the fairest days in the
calendar,--all sun and sky. They are too fair; they are suspiciously