In the fall of 1853, in the evening of a fair autumnal day, I started for Hartford, in the express train. Just above Meriden, an acquaintance sitting beside me, who had been felicitating himself on the prospect of fine weather for a journey to the north, called my attention to several small patches of scud--clouds he called them--to the eastward of us, between us and the full clear moon, which seemed to be enlarging and traveling south--and asked what they meant. "Ah!" said I, "they are scud, forming over the central and northern portions of Connecticut, induced and attracted by the influence of a storm which is passing from the westward to the eastward, over the northern parts of New England, and are traveling toward it in a southerly surface wind, which we have run into. They seem to go south, because we are running north faster than they. You see them at the eastward because they are forming successively as the storm and its influence passes in that direction, and are most readily seen in the range of the moon; but when we reach Hartford you will see them in every direction, more numerous and dense, running north to underlie that storm." I had seen such appearances too many times to be deceived. It was so. When we arrived at Hartford they were visible in all directions, running to the northward at the rate of twenty-five miles an hour. In the space of forty minutes we had passed from a clear, calm atmosphere (and which still remained so), into a cloudy, damp air, and brisk wind blowing in the same direction we were traveling, and toward a heavy storm. My friend passed on, and met the southern edge of the rain at Deerfield, and had a most unpleasant journey during the forenoon of the next day. Taking the cars soon afterwards, in the afternoon, for the south, I found him on his return. "Shall I have fair weather now till I get home?" said he. "There are no indications of a storm here, or at present," I replied, "but we may observe them elsewhere, and at nightfall." He kept a sharp look-out, and, as we neared New Haven, discovered faint lines of cirrus cloud low down in the west, extending in parallel bars, contracting into threads, up from the western horizon, in an E. N. E. direction toward the zenith. "Now, what is that?" said he.