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Howe come home to-day with my wife, and staid with us all night, staying late up singing songs, and then he and I to bed together in Ashwell's bed and she with my wife. This the first time that I ever lay in the room. This day Greatorex brought me a very pretty weather-glass for heat and cold.
They are very ugly, to be sure, but every ugly insect is not to be called a nasty creature, for some are very useful, notwithstanding their not being as handsome as others; and spiders are very useful too, although very few people know how to make use of them; but they little think that the poor little insect which they brush off the wall, and trample under their feet, can tell them what weather they are going to have, as sure, and surer than a weather-glass.
A gale was a gale to him, and he knew that it would usually change its direction as a clock's hands will in moving over the dial; and if, by chance, it should back around to its former point, he prepared for heavier trouble, with no reference to the fluctuations of the barometer, which instrument to him was merely a weather-glass about as valuable as a rheumatic big toe.
The next morning, Sunday, Edwin came downstairs late, to the sound of singing. In his soft carpet-slippers he stopped at the foot of the stairs and tapped the weather-glass, after the manner of his father; and listened. It was a duet for female voices that was being sung, composed by Balfe to the words of the good Longfellow's "Excelsior."
Let the storm come, we'll meet it!" John Mangles remained on deck the whole night, for though as yet the sky was still unclouded, he had such faith in his weather-glass, that he took every precaution that prudence could suggest. About 11 P. M. the sky began to darken in the south, and the crew were called up, and all the sails hauled in, except the foresail, brigantine, top-sail, and jib-boom.
All the nine rolled their eyes exceedingly, and had very red lips. At the extremities of the curve they formed, seated in their chairs, were the performers on the tambourine and bones. The Momuses on either side of him had each another instrument peculiar to the Father of Waters, which may be likened to a stringed weather-glass held upside down. There were likewise a little flute and a violin.
Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she inwardly called his moodiness a name which to her covered his thoughtful preoccupation with other subjects than herself, as well as that uneasy look of the brow and distaste for all ordinary things as if they were mixed with bitter herbs, which really made a sort of weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding.
Faster than ever river ran towards the sea, it flashes, darkens, and rolls away. Not a thread changes, in the house of the two little bird-like ladies. The clock ticks over the fireplace, the weather-glass hangs in the hall. Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right; but we believe in both, devoutly. I have come legally to man's estate. I have attained the dignity of twenty-one.
Before noon it rains, by three o'clock it hails; before night the bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging, whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is drifted in banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the seventeenth century, Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass. Before that, men had suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering.
They are most common in I had almost said they are confined to those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they conceive to be the Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the fact for fact I believe it to be that Paris fashions are invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment; according to the strange system which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather-glass to insure fine weather.
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