Francis Rolt-Wheeler

“ Hand over hand, again, up the rope came the boat until once more it was under the window. Meanwhile, by heroic exertions, Anton had swung himself up on the window-sill. As the boat came beneath him, the crippled lad swung out on the rope and proceeded to climb down into the boat.
He was not a moment too soon. While Ross had been bringing the boat to place, the speed of the current had increased and the house, like a clumsy Noah's Ark, began to sweep swiftly towards the gully of which Anton had spoken.
"Quick, Anton," said Ross, as the smaller lad hesitated, "we've got to be quick." ”

“ Before a month was over, every member had a kite, and, as kite-races were to be held, every boy had to build his kite himself, absolutely without any outside help. It was nothing less than amazing to see how these kites, all built on the same pattern by different boys, behaved differently. It seemed almost as if the characters of the boys appeared in their kites. Bob's was the slowest and most powerful, Anton's the fastest but behaved poorly in a strong wind, Monroe's was absolutely useless in a zephyr. ”

“ Anton, his eager eyes shining out of his pale face. The crippled boy hobbled across the room on his crutch and grasped his chum tightly by the shoulder. He was trembling like an aspen-leaf in the wind.
"Scared, Anton?" said Ross. "I'm not surprised. You've a good right to be." ”

“ Ahead of the soldiers, every day, the sun rose red upon an empty land, every night it set, red, behind them, upon a land equally bare and empty. Day after day they marched through this land without food, unmolested by the Russians, who knew well that lack of forage and interminable marching was defeating the great Napoleon better than they could upon the battlefield, and without the sacrifice of a single Russian soldier. ”

“ Taking a long breath, but with his heart knocking against his ribs, Ross dived through the broken window. It is one thing to be able to swim and dive, it is another to plunge through a splintered window-frame into a dark house in the middle of the night, with a flood roaring on all sides. ”

“ The rumble of the thunder—which used to be thought the rolling of a chariot in the sky, is due to the different distances of various portions of the discharge, to the echo of the explosions from the projecting hills and valleys of the cloud forms, and to the irregular shape of the earth, when the sound waves strike the ground. ”

“ Ask a commission merchant, whose business depends upon his receiving his produce in good condition, whether the Weather Bureau warnings are profitable or no? Ask a fruit merchant, who knows that a difference of twenty degrees in temperature during shipment spells either profit or disaster! Ask a shipowner on the Great Lakes or the captain of a trading schooner in the Gulf! These men will tell you that their lives and their fortunes hang on their careful understanding of the weather. ”

“ The vibrations in the air were so terrific as to break windows and overturn frame houses over a hundred miles away, and the pressure wave, like some huge blast of wind, traveled round the world three times before it died down. ”

“ Ross looked down at the faithful old darky, who, despite his terror and in the teeth of certain death, had turned back to try to save the aged blind woman in the negro quarters. The tornado [Pg 279] had dealt kindly with him. His ragged clothing fluttered in the wind, but his kind old face was peaceful.
The sunlight, gleaming through the crystal, made a halo of light around the negro's head.
"Don't!" said Ross, laying his hand on Anton's shoulder. "There's mighty few of us that'll ever get the chance to die like Dan'l." ”

“ Hail never falls in winter, only in summer, and almost always in connection with a thunderstorm. It is made by drops of moisture, like very fine rain, being carried by the strong upward currents of a thunderstorm to altitudes where the air is very cold, there becoming coated with a layer of snow, and becoming heavier, falling through the less active upward currents on the edge of a storm. As these snow-covered frozen raindrops fall through the clouds, they grow bigger, because on their cold snow surfaces the moisture condenses and is frozen to a skin of ice. ”

“ The hurricane still raged over Galveston. We had been derelict for two days and a half, at the pumps for fifty-seven hours, without food or water for forty hours, yet not a man was lost. No other dismasted vessel has ever lived through the eye of a hurricane and been tossed over a sea-wall into the business streets of a city. ”

“ Weather, boys, always weather, is the greatest ally or the greatest enemy in the entire history of war.
"At last the army saw in the distance a long black line. Every effort of Napoleon to persuade the Russians to attack him had failed, the Russian army steadily withdrew. But when the long black line of Smolensk appeared, hope was restored to the French army. At last they would meet the Russians on equal terms and decide the campaign against guns and bayonets instead of against leagues and starvation! On Napoleon marched and at last found himself before the town of Smolensk. ”

“ The interior of a continent in summer time heats and expands the air in the same way that the air is heated over the equator, and, in the same manner, sets in motion another system of winds, for cold air comes rushing down from all sides and forces up the rising warm air.
"Take Asia, for example, where the continental mass is large and the plateaus high. The interior becomes so hot that the air is sent up like the draught in a big chimney, and cool winds from the sea blow toward the interior from all sides in the summer time, and away from it, to all sides, in the winter time. ”

“ The sun is shining on some part of the earth all the time. There's never a second, day or night, that water is not being evaporated from the seas, from lakes, from rivers and from the earth itself. All the water that is taken up must fall somewhere, and all the rain that falls means that the atmosphere must fill itself with water vapor again. It's a continuous performance, and the water which is being evaporated into the air falls to the earth, sooner or later, as rain, hail, or snow. ”

“ All the very old Sequoias have lost their heads by lightning. All things come to him who waits, but of all living things, Sequoia is perhaps the only one able to wait long enough to make sure of being struck by lightning. ”

“ The Weather Man looked at him.
"Some of these days," he said, "remind me to talk to you about sunlight and dust, and I'll tell you a heap of things you don't know. Right now, get this idea in your head. The larger a piece of matter is, the smaller is the surface in proportion to the bulk. A feather of swan's down will float in a high wind, but if you roll that feather into a ball, it will fall. ”

“ A moist climate feels hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than a dry one, although, in reality, it isn't as hot or as cold. Every moist climate is a cloudy climate, and Ireland—which is called the Green or Emerald Isle because there's so much rain that none of the vegetation ever dries up—has some of the most beautiful clouds in the world."
"Is there any place in the United States without clouds?" asked Ralph. ”

“ If a storm is moving eastward, with a heavy rainfall, and we've had telegraphic dispatches from all the towns in the west through which it has passed, it's not hard to figure the speed at which the storm is traveling, and it's a sure prediction to tell a city to the eastward of that storm that rain can be expected at about a certain date. Or, if there's a high flood wave at St. Louis, and we know the speed of the Mississippi current, we can notify Greenville, Vicksburg, and New Orleans at what time the trouble is likely to come to them. ”

“ The difference between a careful man and a careless one is the difference between a man who thinks in advance and a man who does not think until some condition of grave difficulty is thrust upon him. Weather is, to this day, and will ever remain, one of the most potent factors in human welfare, and a man cannot plan for the weather in advance, unless he has a weather forecast. ”

“ Reassured, Ross turned to his companion, and asked:
"What makes tornadoes, Anton?"
"A quick current of warm air going up in a thunderhead cloud," he said, "which takes a spinning motion from the general whirl of the cyclone to which it belongs. It has a whirling vortex, from the outside to the inside, and its speed gets higher toward the middle. The speed of the inside of a tornado has never been figured out, but it has been estimated at eight hundred miles an hour, or sixteen times as fast as a train." ”

“ The success of the Weather Forecasts which had been put out in the weekly Review and the saving of Jed Tighe's crop had given the League a high standing among the farmers of the neighborhood, but when the story became noised abroad how Anton had saved Dan'l from unjust arrest, every darky in the neighborhood became its devoted slave.
Dan'l himself racked his brains for some way to show his appreciation, but none occurred to him. He could not be any more faithful and loyal than he had been in the past. A dozen plans occurred to him, all to be set aside as useless. ”

“ Famines have a tremendous effect on the world's history. The great French Revolution, one of the greatest events in modern history, was brought to a head by a famine. This was the 'Three Year Freeze' of 1784-1786."
"Did that follow a volcanic eruption, sir?" asked Anton.
"It followed the greatest eruption in the history of the world, that of Asama, in Japan, in the year 1783. In that eruption, fifty-six thousand people were killed and the entire atmosphere of the earth was shaken. Like Krakatoa, you see, boys, it took three years for the dust to settle down." ”

“ You can see for yourselves, boys, that if the bottom of the Mississippi is just made of light mud, light enough to be carried down as muddy water for hundreds of miles, any little change in the current of the river will stir up that mud again and scoop out a hole. ”

“ I was thinking that it would be rather jolly if each member of the League had a set of cloud photographs for himself, with the right names of the clouds and all that sort of thing on the back. It isn't much trouble to make prints."
"I'd like to have a set, Ralph," said Ross promptly. "I hate to feel like a dub and not know about the clouds. It's like not knowing any of the stars."
"There certainly ought to be a set in the office of the Review," declared its editor-in-chief.
"I've been wondering," began Anton, "whether Mr. Levin wouldn't pick out the best ones and tell us exactly what they are. ”

“ Sunlight is never white, as you know, it's yellow-white and the golden effect is due to dust. It's the same way at sunset. Then the rays of the sun which reach you pass through a larger amount of air, because you're looking at them from an angle, so they have to strike more grains of dust, and more of the blue rays are scattered. Then, too, when the sun, at sunset is, to you, shining obliquely on the atmosphere, it is passing through several layers of air and these bend the rays differently. ”

“ There's not a town of any size in the county, one day's a good deal like another, and we're apt to think of places like New York, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco as being the fighting centres of the nation's life.
"Yet, right here, right over our heads, the never-ending battle of the weather goes on, with its brigades of warring clouds, its wind-cavalry and its artillery of storm. The sky holds more secrets than the city does and there's a lot of [Pg 100] adventurous work to be done. ”

“ You can see that a very faint flash could jump a distance of an inch, but that it would take a stronger current to jump a yard, and that a terrific force of electricity must have accumulated before the current is strong enough to break down the resistance of the non-conducting air and jump a quarter of a mile. When lightning is attracted by the earth, it means that the air between the thunder-cloud and the earth is being subjected to a constant strain, and the weakest place gives way first. ”

“ The United States is in this west-wind zone and the strength and regularity of the eastward movement of the weather is because both the winds of the surface and of the upper air blow in the same direction. Naturally, the same conditions are repeated on the other side of the equator. In the southern hemisphere the land masses are not so large and the regularity of the winds is less disturbed. There, the west winds are so strong that certain latitudes are known as the 'roaring forties.' These 'forties' correspond in latitude to the northern third of the United States. ”

“ Every few minutes a soldier dropped from starvation, cold and exhaustion. The Russians did not appear. There was no need. They had a new ally—the wolves! No one could stop to pick up an exhausted soldier; it was all that any man could do to keep up himself. ”

“ No census will ever tell how many were killed in that stretch of prairie between Galveston and Texas City. Years hence men will stumble over human bones on that grassy plain and give burial to some victim of the greatest storm that ever visited American shores. Yet, withal, that the hurricane of 1915 claimed six hundred victims instead of tens of thousands was due alone to the [Pg 311] warnings of the Weather Bureau, to the heroism of the men and women of Galveston and to the craft, skill and honesty of the men who built the great sea-wall. ”

“ If climatic conditions were regular, we could forecast the weather several years in advance, instead of only a few days. There are a thousand complicating factors. Land and sea are irregularly divided, and as there is more evaporation from the sea than the land, every little curve in a coast line means a disturbance of regularity. Then, Anton, remember, while the earth is almost a globe it is not perfectly round, so that every variation from the regular [Pg 48] curve disturbs the air currents. Moreover, the motions of the earth are very complicated. ”