8. A Cloud is Where you See it

That is the first idea you have to get well into your minds concerning the abodes of this visible vapour; next, you have to consider the manner of its visibility. Is it, you have to ask, with cloud vapour, as with most other things, that they are seen when they are there, and not seen when they are not there? or has cloud vapour so much of the ghost in it, that it can be visible or invisible as it likes, and may perhaps be all unpleasantly and malignantly there, just as much when we don’t see it, as when we do? To which I answer, comfortably and generally, that, on the whole, a cloud is where you see it, and isn’t where you don’t; that, when there’s an evident and honest thunder-cloud in the north-east, you needn’t suppose there’s a surreptitious and slinking one in the north-west;—when there’s a visible fog at Bermondsey, it doesn’t follow there’s a spiritual one, more than usual, at the West End: and when you get up to the clouds, and can walk into them or out of them, as you like, you find when you’re in them they wet your whiskers, or take out your curls, and when you’re out of them, they don’t; and therefore you may with probability assume—not with certainty, observe, but with probability—that there’s more water in the air where it damps your curls than where it doesn’t. If it gets much denser than that, it will begin to rain; and then you may assert, certainly with safety, that there is a shower in one place, and not in another; and not allow the scientific people to tell you that the rain is everywhere, but palpable in Tooley Street, and impalpable in Grosvenor Square.