STRAY NOTES.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 636, 27 May 1921, Page 7

STRAY NOTES.

(By ‘’Don Quixote.” Wo hitmans are an unobservant lot. many of too beauties of tlie um\eise ■\vo never .see or, if our attention is attracted, it is but for the moment and v/e hurriedly pass on to our purely mundane affairs. Take the wonderful ‘"sky pictures, which eacli day are spread above and around us. lunned by the hand of the ‘'Great Aichit,ecl of the Universe,” from the fust nearly streak of dawn which, as Omar Khayyam has it “That puts the stars to flight,” to the end of the day, when the sun goes down in a £jlory of crimson and gold, each tun cloudlet being flecked with pink, the whole a gorgeous panorama of exquisite colour, colour so wonderful, so transient, that even the great artist who feels its beauty in his sou!, feels also his inability to transfer it to the :anvas at his hand.

Those marvellous masses of Cumulus piled on Cumuli, that are the clouds of fm«uweather, though sometimes hiding in their depths the thunder .storms of summer. And Cirrus, the highest of all the clouds, you see its hair-like vapour drawn across the deer) blue sky, termed by the huntsmen “mare’s tails” and “cat’s tails” by the sailors, and which warn us of the. sneedy coming of rude Boreas. Strata?, the cloud that lies in long horizontal' bands and indicates a change of weather. And Nimbus, with its uniform grey tint and ragged edges, that covers all the sky and sends us hurrying home with clothes well soaked with the pouring rain. What wonderful “sky pictures” they give us, sometimes like dens*, masses c-f rising smoke on the horizon, at others they assume strange shaper, hike colossal giants thrown up against the blue, or huge aeroplanes, or mighty fleet in bcjm:„” making its way across the infinity of space and then the air currents that control their form, change find they are dissipated into \apouiinvisibls to the human eye. In ghc good old days, when we had no weather forecasts by Mr Wragge and barometers were few and far between, the old shepherds and countiynien were learned in the v.eatnei signs shown in the sky, the old sayjng “Bed in the morning, is the shephcry’s warning. Red sky at night i? ' the shepherd’s delights’ is stiff as C true as when experience, the great teacher, first proclaimed its worth. sßen the flowers, had their lessor, for observant eyes, as shown by the following couplet, “When the Speedwell shuts°it flower, hurry home to miss the shower.” Nowadays we are too clever lor this sort of thing. Science has taken the place of the old weather lore and v/e, eagerly open the paper to see wr.st Clement Wragge has to say about it, and really he is often right. That reminds me. At one period of long, continued barometric depression some inciignert wit christened hirn “Unclcment Wragge.”