What a creature of habit, too, Nature is as she appears in the weather! If she miscarry once she will twice and thrice, and a dozen times. In a wet time it rains to-day because it rained yesterday, and will rain to-morrow because it rained to-day. Are the crops in any part of the country drowning? They shall continue to drown. Are they burning up? They shall continue to burn. The elements get in a rut and can’t get out without a shock. I know a farmer who, in a dry time, when the clouds gather and look threatening, gets out his watering-pot at once, because, he says, “it won’t rain, and ’tis an excellent time to apply the water.” Of course, there comes a time when the farmer is wrong, but he is right four times out of five. But I am not going to abuse the weather; rather to praise it, and make some amends for the many ill-natured things I have said, within hearing of the clouds, when I have been caught in the rain or been parched and withered by the drought. When Mr. Fields’s “Village Dogmatist” was asked what caused the rain, or the fog, he leaned upon his cane and answered, with an air of profound wisdom, that “when the atmosphere and hemisphere come together it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces the rain,”—or the fog, as the case may be. The explanation is a little vague, as his biographer suggests, but it is picturesque, and there can be little doubt that two somethings do come in contact that produce a sweating when it rains or is foggy. More than that, the philosophy is simple and comprehensive, which Goethe said was the main matter in such things. Goethe’s explanation is still more picturesque, but I doubt if it is a bit better philosophy. “I compare the earth and her atmosphere,” he said to Eckermann, “to a great living being perpetually inhaling and exhaling. If she inhale she draws the atmosphere to her, so that, coming near her surface, it is condensed to clouds and rain. This state I call water-affirmative.” The opposite state, when the earth exhales and sends the watery vapors upward so that they are dissipated through the whole space of the higher atmosphere, he called “water-negative.” This is good literature, and worthy the great poet; the science of it I would not be so willing to vouch for.