"In a cloudless country, boys, there are great extremes of temperature, as much as forty to fifty degrees between noon and midnight. You'll get sunstroke in the early part of the afternoon and shiver under blankets in the evening. That's because there are no protecting layers of clouds to equalize the radiation. The air, especially high up, is very cold. Don't forget that the upper clouds are all made of ice crystals."
"I've been wondering," said Anton, "how you can find out that it's so cold high up in the air if no one can live up there?"
"Balloonists have often passed through clouds of ice crystals and snow," the Forecaster answered, "though, of course, they've not been as high as the upper clouds. Many observations have been made by releasing small sounding balloons with an instrument attached, letting them go as high as they could, until they burst and fell to the ground. But much of our upper-air exploring has also been done with kites."
"Kites? Like Franklin's?"
"Not quite," said the Forecaster; "our weather kites aren't built like that. They look more like a box. I'm expecting one here, every day."
"Here?"
"Yes, boys," the Forecaster answered, "right here. There's a young chap I know who used to work with William A. Eddy, of New Jersey, the father of scientific kite-flying in this country. I wrote to young Osborne, and sent him a copy of the Issaquena County Weather Review, the one with the sunset articles and pictures in it."
"Osborne, sir!" ejaculated the editor-in-chief, "I got his subscription just a week ago."
"Did you?" said the Forecaster, interested. "That's nice of him! He wrote to me that he was constantly improving his kite models and that he had a couple of old ones which he now seldom flew. He sent me their records, too, so I know they must be good kites. He wanted to know if the Mississippi League of the Weather wouldn't do some kite-flying and send him records of the observations."
"Would we?" cried the enthusiastic Monroe. "I should say we would!"