Three Men in A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the rain came down faster than ever.  On Wednesday I went and hit it again, and the pointer went round towards “set fair,” “very dry,” and “much heat,” until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn’t go any further.  It tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn’t prophesy fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself.  It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace “very dry.”

Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.

Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a prolonged spell of grand weather some time, and read out a poem which was printed over the top of the oracle, about

“Long foretold, long last; Short notice, soon past.”

The fine weather never came that summer.  I expect that machine must have been referring to the following spring.

Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones.  I never can make head or tail of those.  There is one side for 10 a.m. yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can’t always get there as early as ten, you know.  It rises or falls for rain and fine, with much or less wind, and one end is “Nly” and the other “Ely” (what’s Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn’t tell you anything.  And you’ve got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit, and even then I don’t know the answer.

But who wants to be foretold the weather?  It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.  The prophet we like is the old man who, on the particularly gloomy-looking morning of some day when we particularly want it to be fine, looks round the horizon with a particularly knowing eye, and says:

“Oh no, sir, I think it will clear up all right.  It will break all right enough, sir.”

“Ah, he knows”, we say, as we wish him good-morning, and start off; “wonderful how these old fellows can tell!”