Everywhere throughout the lower atmosphere there is some humidity, or water vapour, in the air. There may be a great deal of it or very little. In liquid form it is rain.
In cold weather the water vapor, which is really water in the form of a gas, may change from a vapor form and then turn quickly into the shape of snowflakes.
Sometimes this water vapor may turn into ice instead of snow. This frozen rain is called hail. Hail may be as small as peas or as large as hen's eggs. There are times when the water vapor in the air floats slowly toward the ground in the form of very tiny droplets of water. This is called fog.
The fog lies on the ground but may stretch upward for as much as a thousand feet or more. When the fog is very heavy it may prevent you from seeing more than five or ten feet ahead. Clouds are another form of water vapor in the air. Like fog they are made up of tiny droplets of water, but they float high in the air instead of spreading out along the ground. They may float as high as 50,000 feet above the ground. Clouds are usually higher in the summer than in the winter. Some parts of the United States are cloudier than others. In most parts of America it is cloudy about half the time.
Spiders In The Garden
Watching for their prey in the centre of a radiating geometrical snare, we often find the garden spiders. The beauty of their vertical orb-webs and the large size of these strikingly marked creatures always attract our attention during summer strolls.
Jack & Jill The Vulture Twins
Probably this story of Jack and Jill, the Vulture Twins, would never have been written, if Betsy, Farmer Parsons' old brindle cow, had not refused to come up from the woods one night. But she wouldn't come, so Farmer Parsons had to go down after her.
At Home With Mr. Burroughs
Youth still peered out at me in spite of his crowning thatch of silvery hair when I first met John Burroughs in 1904. As we walked together on our way to his rustic little house in the woods called "Slab-sides,"
