“If it rains before seven, It will clear before eleven.”
“You can tell before two. What it’s going to do.”
There will be as many snow-storms in a winter as there are days remaining in the month after the first fall of snow.
Children are told, of the falling snow, that the old woman, up in the sky, is shaking her feather-bed.
High tides on the coast of Maine are considered a sign of rain.
When the muskrat builds his nest higher than usual, it is a sign of a wet spring, as this means high water in the ponds and streams.
which is as much as to say that a thaw, with its usual accompaniments of fog and rain, is invariably productive of much sickness.
Winter thunder is to old folks death, and to young folks plunder.
“Sound, travelling far and wide, A stormy day will betide.”
Do business with men when the wind is northwest--that signifies that a clear sky and bracing air are most conducive to alertness and energy; yet Hamlet says: “I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”
That was certainly a pretty conceit, no matter if it has been lost sight of, that the sun always dances upon Easter morning.
One of the oldest of weather rhymes runs in this wise:--
“Evening gray and morning red, Brings down rain on the traveller’s head; Evening red and morning gray, Sends the traveller on his way.”
Science having finally accepted what vulgar philosophy so long maintained, namely that the moon exerts an undoubted influence upon the tides of the sea, all the various popular beliefs concerning her influence upon the weather that have been wafted to us over, we know not how many centuries, find ready credence. If the mysterious luminary could perform one miracle, why not others? Thus reasoned the ignorant multitude.
The popular fallacy that the moon is made of “greene cheese,” as sung by Heywood, and repeated by that mad wag Butler, in “Hudibras,” may be considered obsolete, we suppose, but in our youth we have often heard this said, and, it is to be feared, half believed it.
Cutting the hair on the waxing of the moon, under the delusion that it will then grow better, is another such.
As preposterous as it may seem, our worthy ancestors, or some of them at least, firmly believed that the Man in the Moon was veritable flesh and blood.