Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1931-01-07
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

A rainy day!
Such day Is news, now.
But q rainy day is always interesting
to q certain type of person.
Just what this type Is, we do not
know exactly, but we rather suspect
that he Is one who would be called
Mature lover"
To love Nature is to take natural
phenomena as they come, not to be
depressed unduly over gloomy days, or
unnaturaIly elated over sunny ones.
He whose mind and heart find salts
faction in things as they are, not as
he might wish them to be, accepts the
few rainy days of the present season
with more than usual gladness, however.
Rain Is news, now, and means a
great deal to the country and to the
city. Those Short-sighted urbanites who
somehow feel that rain discommodes
them ought to wake up to the situation.
The National Capital and contiguous
territory is 20 inches behind its season.
al average as the result of the drought
of 1880.
But that Is not all. It will take
some steady raining, and many SHOWS,
to place everything even, in the matter
of precipitation, during 1881.
Every one in the city should rejoice
over every rain, and wish that it might
continue. He will only be able to do
this, however, in many cases, If he sees
something In falling water which ap-
peals to his sense of the picturesque,
the satisfying, the colorful, the interest
ing.
Surely the man or woman who was
brought up on the real literature of
the world, not the cheap stuff of the
moment eve do not mean this moment,
but any moment, at any time), has an
excellent mental background for seeing
rain and snow as happenings color
full, interesting, useful
The poems of the elder poets are
filled with reference to these natural
phenomena. There is scarcely q novel
Of the older writers which does not
contain some reference to snow or rain.
Indeed, one of the little noted diff
ferenceS between the books of such
writer's as Scott, Thackeray and Dickens
and the novels Of some of the writers
Of today is that the latter scarcely ever
mention such Grass occurrences as pre-
cipitations, as the Weather Bureau in
sists on calling them.
1t is true that many of the older
novelists had cut-and-dried system of
making the mental moods OF their hero
ines cO1ncloe WIN the VagarleS OF the
weather. If Mary were depressed, the
SKY wept"; If her mood veered to sun
niness, the barometer was sure to GO
up, and the real sun come out. But we
OF more sophisticated generation may
forgive them. Surely, in reading, we
forget about this strange similarity; it
Is only when we stop to think about it
that 1t strikes us as peculiar.
Those elder flctionists were good
enough, in their work, to give the reader
the sense Of reality, Of passing days, of
human longing, of action true to Ma
ture. In reading, the fact that mental
moods and the casts of the heavens
went along in harmony never for 9
moment caused any disturbance in the
mind Of the reader.
~
Perhaps those older writer's not only
were not foolish, but were more right
than we give them credit for being, in
critical moments.
Mankind often pays no attention to
the sky until some unusual elation or
detection causes him to raise his ewes
TO Heaven. Then he is struck-if it Is
So-to discover the sun shining, or to
find the clouds dropping rain. If the
weather chimes in with his mood he
remembers 1t, and II he writes of his