I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the
week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not.
I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the
rain came down faster than ever. On Wednesday I went and hit it again,
and the pointer went round towards "set fair," "very dry," and "much
heat," until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further. It
tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy
fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself. It
evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine,
and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it,
and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very
dry."
Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of
the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.
Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a prolonged spell of
grand weather SOME TIME, and read out a poem which was printed over the
top of the oracle, about
"Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past."
The fine weather never came that summer. I expect that machine must have
been referring to the following spring.
Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones.
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