We have all heard tell of the "Clerk of the Weather." What a poor, ill-used, roundly-rated, over-worked individual he must be! His whole life must be spent in an impossible endeavour to please everybody. We may imagine the poor man going of a morning towards his office with languid steps and weary, wondering all the while to himself what sort of weather he ought to give the public to-day. Arrived in front of his desk, he must stagger back with dismay at the piles on piles of letters heaped thereon. To read them all is out of the question; so he sits down and draws one forth, just as you would draw a card from the hand of someone who pretended to tell fortunes. He opens the letter. It isn't a pleasant one by any means. There is a tone of growling impatience in every line of it. How long, the writer, who is an invalid, wants to know, are these horrible east winds going to prevail down in Devonshire? She has come here for her health's sake; she has been here for three weeks, and all that time it has never ceased to blow, and she has never ceased to cough and ache. The clerk throws this epistle into the Balaam box and listlessly draws out another. "Don't you think," the writer says, "that a blink of sunshine would be a blessing--and a drop or two of warm rain to bring the fruit on, and the garden stuff? What is the good of having a Clerk of the Weather at all if he cannot attend better to his duties?" That letter is also pitched into the Balaam box, and a third drawn--a delightful little cocked-hat of a letter, written on delicately-perfumed paper, probably with a dove's quill. She--of course it is a she!--is going to a garden-party on Tuesday week; would he, the Clerk of the Weather, kindly see that not a drop of rain falls on that day? Only bright sunshine, and occasional cloudlets to act as awnings and temper its heat. The Clerk with a smile places that letter aside for further consideration, and goes on drawing. All and everyone of them either demand impossibilities or merely write to abuse the poor Clerk for some fancied dereliction of duty. One wants rain, another growls because there has been too much wet. This one is grumbling at the fogs, this other at the sunshine; this one suggests snow for a change, and this other begs for a thunderstorm to clear the atmosphere. And so on and so forth. No wonder the bewildered Clerk jumps up at last and over-turns the table, letters and all, and audibly expresses a desire to let all the winds loose upon the world at once, to revel and tear and do as they like, to bring blinding snow from the far north and drenching rains from the torrid zone, to order a select assortment of thunderstorms from the Cape of Good Hope, and a healthy tornado from the Indian Ocean. But he thinks better of it, burns all the letters, and goes quietly on with his day's duty.