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He was talking more to her tonight than he had ever done before. She asked him about a new picture she had seen in his room; a queer thing full of stiff, supplicating female figures. "It's Indian, isn't it?" "Yes. I call it Rain Spirits, or maybe, Indian Rain. In the Southwest, where I've been a good deal, the Indian traditions make women have to do with the rain-fall.
It would be a wrong conclusion should any one decide that the summer was lacking in those qualities of atmosphere which so happily characterizes other portions of the year. True, there is a diminution of aridity, but no disappearance, and the effect on the invalid is beneficial and decided. The humidity of the atmosphere is not always determined by the rain-fall.
The extreme high temperature of the interior division equals that of points lying a dozen degrees south in other longitudes, and the desiccated winds from the west, as they blow over this parched and heated surface, have their aridity rather than their humidity increased, as would be the case in other circumstances; and not till they reach within perhaps five hundred miles of the eastern boundary of this continental division do they increase in humidity, as indicated by the rain-fall, which rises in quantity from the low minimum of seven and a half cubic inches per annum in the "great basin," and fifteen on the "great plains," to about twenty in Dakota territory and twenty-five in Minnesota, the eastern limit of this continental climate.
That night I wrote in my diary, after some comments on my relations with Mr. Kittredge: "It is best to be off with the old love, Before you are on with the new." The annual rain-fall on the lower Columbia River is upward of eighty inches often almost ninety; and the greater amount of this fall is during the winter months, from November to March, generally the least intermittent in December.
Far from any house or hut, in the depth of dreary moor-land, a road, unfenced and almost unformed, descends to a rapid river. The crossing is called the "Seven Corpse Ford," because a large party of farmers, riding homeward from Middleton, banded together and perhaps well primed through fear of a famous highwayman, came down to this place on a foggy evening, after heavy rain-fall.
In the first place, you must understand that the rain-fall varies extraordinarily. The trade-wind brings rain; the islands are bits of mountain ranges; the side of the mountain which lies toward the rain-wind gets rain; the lee side gets scarcely any. At Hilo it rains almost constantly; at Lahaina they get hardly a shower a year.
You may have seen a sown field in spring immediately after a great rain-fall; and you may have observed that a large portion of it, on its lower side, was smooth, and run together and caked, bearing all the marks of having been for some days under water. On the higher portions the wheat was springing, but on this portion, sown at the same time, the ground was bare.
We have stated the rain-fall to be less in Minnesota than in any other State in the entire Union, with one exception; and while this is true, it is still great enough for all agricultural uses, coming chiefly in the summer months, at a time when the crops are growing; and, by the middle of September, as a rule, the quantity has fallen off to a very low mean, accompanied by that elastic, invigorating atmosphere for which the State is so justly famed.
The years 1816 and 1817 were cases in point. The meteorology of Russia affords some striking contrasts: the yearly rain-fall in St Petersburg is 21 inches, 'and the westerly winds are most prevalent, although not to the same extent as in Western Europe; they are also predominant in Moscow and Kasan.
If then it were proved that an extension of irrigated soil was not followed by an increase of rain-fall in the same territory, the probability that the precipitation was augmented SOMEWHERE would not be in the least diminished.
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