While the best indications of the clear day are the great fundamental ones, there are many little signs that bolster up one's confidence in one's own predictions. The lessened humidity coincident with clear weather is responsible often for many little household prognostics. Salt is dry. The windows (of your summer cottage) do not stick. The children are less restless. Smoke ascends, or if the wind is blowing is not flattened to the ground. Flies are merely insects, for the time being, and not the devil. Swallows and the other birds that eat insects fly high because that is where the insects are. Spiders do not hesitate to make their webs on the lawn. They welcome dew but distrust rain. Cow and sheep feed quietly, rarely calling to one another as they do before a storm. In short the general aspect of these is normal and therefore remains unnoticed. But all these household prognostics may be advertising the most placid weather while only twelve hours away and coming at sixty miles an hour may be the severest storm of the season. The Weather Bureau with its maps and barometers follows its every movement. The man in the woods whose comfort in summer and whose life in winter may depend upon his preparedness for the approaching storm does well to read its warnings and know its laws. CHAPTER III THE STORM CYCLE Doubtless those who hope for a Hereafter of unmitigated ease and song, desire, on this earth, one long, sweet anticyclone. But theirs, in most of the United States, is disappointment. With an irregularity that seems perversely regular at times our fair weather is interrupted by a storm which in turn gives way to some more fair weather or another storm,--there is no telling which very long in advance. And that is why American weather ranks high among our speculative interests. To emphasize this irregularity a seemingly regular succession of events may be noticed. It will cloud up, let's say, on a Sunday, rain on Monday and Tuesday, clear on Wednesday, staying clear until Sunday when it will cloud up for the repeat. During this past season it rained on a dozen washdays in succession. The newspapers grew jocular about it. And very often one notices two or three rainy Sundays in a row. By actual observation this year we enjoyed fifteen clear Thursdays in succession in a normal spring. The weather gets into a rut. And if the anticyclones and cyclones were all of the same intensity it is conceivable that the rainy Sundays might go on until the Day of Rest was changed by Statute. But the intensities of the whirls differ. Before long an anticyclone feebler than ordinary is overtaken by a cyclone and annihilated. Or one stronger than the average may dominate the situation for several days. Or the great body of cold air in winter over the interior of Canada may send a succession of moderate antis across our country making a barrier of dry cold air through which the lurking cyclone can not push.