PHENOMENA OF HAZE, FOGS, AND CLOUDS.
The predominant haze, which generally envelops the landscape and reddens the sun and moon during long droughts, is usually ascribed to smoke from burning woods and forests, pervading the air. I have observed a similar prevalent haze, connected with other extensive droughts than the one from which the country is now (August) suffering, and have invariably heard the same vague and inadequate cause assigned. Observation proves conclusively, that the assigned is not the true general cause (although it has its purely local effect), as with winds, for days together, in opposite quarters from local fires on mountain or plain, such widespread districts remain enveloped in haze, although hundreds of miles distant. Neither over such districts was there any odor as from smoke pervading the atmosphere (except temporarily from some neighboring chimneys, which the then heavy air kept near the earth), nor felt by the eyes, which very perceptibly smart when exposed to smoke. It is impossible, with varying winds, that mere local fires should spread smoke so uniformly as to comprise most of the area of the drought, which on this occasion extended from our great western lakes to the Atlantic seacoast; and anomalously, too, that it should have continued so long after a rain had extinguished those fires.
I should assign a very different cause for this phenomenon. Rain drops are negatively electric, while suspended moisture, such as fog, displays itself in the form of vesicles or globules, distended by the presence and prevalence of positive electricity, which refracts the rays of light from so many myriad surfaces, that all objects are thus, necessarily, obscured to the eye. During droughts, when haze prevails, positive electricity in the air becomes in excess, which is heating, and therefore serves still more to subdivide, as well as to expand or distend the floating moisture in the atmosphere (of which it is never entirely deprived) into infinitesimal vesicles, or globules, like minute soap bubbles, and thus from such an infinite number of refracting surfaces is produced the haze, as well as the obscuration of the landscape and the reddened disks of the sun and moon, by the absorption of their heat or red rays, so characteristic of great droughts. This same infinitesimal vesicular condition of suspended moisture, is also the sufficient cause of there being no deposition of dew on such occasions, except where a local change of electric condition cools the air, thus temporarily clearing the atmosphere, and permitting a local deposition of the previously suspended moisture, in the form of dew.
All fogs are due to this same cause, as well as that which, in extreme wintry cold, overhangs the open water, as it yields its comparative heat to the air. The formation and suspension of clouds, in all their varied characteristics, have the same origin. That highly attenuated haze which invests the distant landscape, particularly mountains, with its magical purple hue, is due to the same, but still more ethereal interposition of infinitesimal globules of suspended moisture. In corroboration of this being the true explanation of the phenomena of haze, fogs, etc., is the fact, that as soon as clouds prevail, denoting an electric change in the atmosphere, all haze immediately disappears, or becomes embraced in the larger vesicles or globules, forming clouds.
FLY LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER.
PART II.—CHEVRONS.
She sewed them on upside down. Please to remember that this was in May, 1861 (or was it 1851? it seems a long time ago), when a young lady of the most finished education, polished to the uttermost nine, could not reasonably be expected to know what a sergeant-major was, much less the particular cut and fashion of his badge of rank. I told her, exultingly, that I was appointed sergeant-major of our battalion. 'What's that?' she inquired, simply enough. I explained. The dignity and importance of the office was scarcely diminished in her mind by my explanation; and, indeed, I thought it the grandest in the army. Who would be a commissioned officer, when he could wear our gorgeous gray uniform, trimmed with red, the sleeves wellnigh hidden behind three broad red stripes in the shape of a V, joined at the top by as many broad red arcs, all beautifully set off by the lithe and active figure of Sergeant-Major William Jenkins? As for Mary, who protested that she never could learn the difference between all these grades, or make out the reason for them, she was for her part convinced that not even the colonel himself, certainly not that fat Major Heavysterne, could be grander, or handsomer, or more important than her William. So I forgave her for sewing on my chevrons upside down, although it was at the time an infliction grievous to be born, inasmuch as the fussy little quartermaster-sergeant was thereby enabled to get a day's start of in the admiration and envy of our old company. How they envied us, to be sure! But I had one consolation: Oates' were all straight; mine were arched. And she sewed mine on. His were done by Cutts & Dunn's bandy-legged foreman.
There never was such a uniform as ours. Not even the 'Seventh' itself—incomparable in the eyes of the three-months'—could vie in grand and soldierly simplicity, we thought, with the gray and red of the 9th Battalion, District of Columbia Volunteers. Gray cap, with a red band round it, letters A S, for 'American Sharpshooters' (Smallweed used to say he never saw it spelt in that way before, and to ask anxiously for the other S), gray single-breasted frock coat, with nine gilt buttons, and red facings on the collar and cuffs. Gray pantaloons, with a broad red stripe down the outer seam. The drummers sported the most gorgeous red stomachs ever seen, between two rows of twenty little bullet buttons. The color rendered us liable to be mistaken for the rebels, it is true; but this source of anxiety to the more nervous among us was happily prevented from leading to any unfavorable results by the fatherly care displayed by poor old General Balkinsop, under whose protection, we were sent into the field, in always keeping at least a day's march from the enemy!
When we non-commissioned staff officers were first promoted, we felt badly about leaving our companies; wanted to drill with them still, and so on. But this soon wore off under the pressure of new duties. For my part, I soon found that the adjutant, Lieutenant Harch, regarded it as quite a natural arrangement that the sergeant-major should attend to the office duties, while the adjutant occupied himself exclusively with what he was pleased to style the military part of the business; meaning thereby, guard mounting every morning and Sunday morning, inspection once a week, making an average of, say, twenty minutes work per diem for the adjutant, and leaving the poor sergeant-major enough to occupy and worry him for ten or eleven hours. 'Sergeant-major, publish these orders,' Lieutenant Harch would say, in tones of authority exceeding in peremptory curtness anything I have ever heard since from the commander of a grand army; and then, scraping a match—my match—upon the wall, he would begin attending to his 'military duties' by lighting a cigar—my cigar—and strolling up the avenue, on exhibition, preparatory to going home to dine, while the fag remained driving the pen madly, kindly assisted sometimes by Quartermaster-Sergeant Oates, until long after the dinner hour of the non-commissioned staff. I think the company commanders must sometimes have doubted (unless they carefully refrained from reading orders, as I have sometimes thought probable) whether the adjutant could write his name; for all our orders used to be signed: