Hookham-in-the-Marsh extensions; and that other
railways had also sores, and chairmen like
the practical Mr. Jupiter Bristles and Mr.
Mercator Flint. The great and blessed
legacy left by the Watts and Stephensons of
the past had been made the dice-box of
sharpers and knaves, and the football of fools
and beadles incarnate. Faded widows and
helpless orphans came with their withered
shares to the gate, and were sent empty
away; weeping in the present, desponding
for the future.

          THUNDER AND LIGHTNING.

THERE are two kinds of electricity; the
one vitreous or positive, the other resinous or
negative; and both kinds are produced in
the atmosphere by various causes; chiefly
by evaporation. We may form a slight
idea of the extent of evaporation carried
on over the whole globe—over all the rivers
and lakes and seas, the stagnant pools and
latent moisture, the hidden springs and
boundless oceans—when we remember that
three hundred millions of hogsheads of
water rise daily into vapour over the
Mediterranean alone. By condensation, or the
change which that evaporated vapour
undergoes when returning to a fluid state through
decrease of temperature; by vegetation, by
combustion, and by friction. This last arises
when masses of air, moving in contrary
directions, encounter each other. The friction of
their surfaces develops electricity, which is
especially active when these masses differ in
degrees of moisture and temperature; the
cold developing negative, and the warm
positive, electricity. The friction of the wind,
as it passes over trees, houses, mountains, and
other high objects, is also held to set free the
electricity of the atmosphere; so that we
can understand why thunderstorms should be
almost always accompanied by strong winds,
and should rarely or never occur in perfectly
still weather.

Clouds charged with electricity of one kind
meet and coalesce in good fellowship enough;
but, when those which bear a different kind
meet together, a violent shock is the
consequence. Rains are formed by the meeting of
different winds, as thunder-storms by the
contact of opposing electricities. A warm
soft air, charged with moisture, meets with
a cold wind direct from the polar regions.
The cold north wind condenses and globulates
the vapour, which falls to earth in the form
of Scotch mists or showers.

First, before a storm arises, is seen the
cirrhus; that light fibrous curl-like cloud,
which stretches in undulating waves or
long lines over the sky, sometimes curling
out like the lightest and most graceful
feathers, or like the sweeping grain of knotted
woods. This broadens out into the cirrho-
cumulus, or sonder cloud; those little round
which lie near together but yet separate,
and give the mottled or speckled skies
which are so beautiful in summer afternoons
when they bode no mischief and contain no
evil. Then the cirrho-cumulus gathers itself
into the cumulus proper, or strachen-cloud
—large heaped-up masses that look like
carved marble or sun-covered boulders in the
deep blue sky—those dazzling white day
clouds which children gaze at wonderingly
as if they were solid masses built up in the
heavens, and which even older brains can
scarcely credit to be mere imponderable
vapour. These are the forerunners of the
storm cloud; that dark, grey, rugged mass,
with its sharp and jagged edges, from which
stream down both health and destruction to
the world below; that cloud, darker and
more threatening than the nimbus or
rain-cloud, with which people, who are not good
observers, so often confound it.

Storms never come from the perfectly
uniform and regular clouds which sometimes
cover all the sky. Storm clouds have always
torn and angry edges, as one would expect
from them, fierce and riving as they
are—instruments of death, and among
Nature's earliest embodiments of rage and
devastation. Storms are many patterned.
Franklin says that a thunder-storm never
comes from one cloud only, and Saussure
agrees with him; but other meteorologists
(notably, Bergman and Duchamel de
Monceau, good names enough) assert the
contrary; and Marcovelle states, that on the
twelfth of September, seventeen hundred and
forty-seven, the sky at Toulouse was perfectly
clear, except for one little cloud, from which
suddenly burst a thunderbolt that killed a
woman named Bordenave as she stood before
the house. If that unhappy femme Bordenave
bore but an indifferent character—if
sorcery and the black art were included
among her gifts—we may be sure how the
occasion was improved by all the
anti-witchcraft world; and how an inevitable natural
law was translated into a signal act of Divine
vengeance, calculated to strike terror into
the hearts of all the sabbet-haunters,
loup-garous, broomstick-riders, black cat keepers,
and familiar nourishers in Toulouse.

As storms always commence with the
accumulation of the cirrhus-cloud, and as the
cirrhus-cloud floats very high, it follows that
storms are generally very high above the
earth. Kaemtz, one of the greatest
meteorologists, doubts all the travellers' tales which
set forth how they, the travellers, journeying
over the Alps and the Brocken have seen
storms forming below them. Yet Monsieur
Abbadie found in Ethiopia that an October
storm was only about two hundred and thirty-
three yards above the earth; but the highest
which he noted was one in February, at about
two thousand two hundred and forty yards,
or about a mile and a quarter. As sound
travels three hundred and seventy-five yards
per second, the distance of time elapsing