Borrowing Days
IT is discouraging to be foldafter the violent weather we have been subjected to this spring— that the last three days of March, the old " borrowing days," are generally stately. March having come in this year in such very leonine fashion, we might. one would think, be able to count on its lamb-like departure. and as I write there certainly does seem some hope of this.
March was the first month of the year in the old Calendar, and the original legend of the Borrowing Days conies front Andalusia: a shepherd, the story runs, once promised March a lamb if he would give him good weather throughout the month for ha flock. March agreed to this and for twenty-eight days kept his word Then the shepherd, having got what he wanted and thinking that a Jew storms now could hardly do much damage, tried to back out of his bargain.' But Mhrch got even with him " Know this." lie cried furiously as he. hurled himself down the valley and whistled over the tree-tops. " that tot the three days that are left to 171e and the three more that I can borrow from my sister April, all your sheep will die." And die they did, frozen by the icy winds with which March roared himself ow, and soaked with the snow With which April hailed herself in.
Most of our print rive weather warnings we owe to Aristotle and he derived a number of them from the Egypeans. Then his pupil Theopluastits classified the data that had tren collected in.o Prognostics of Rain, Wind, Storm and Fine Weather. and these formed the basis of most weather reports until comparatively recent retires. Now. of course, we are so accustomed to having our weather prescribed for us each evening by the B B.C. thin we have given up bothering about the old country . prophecies, one of which is that cattle graze uphill when tine weather is on the way and downhill when storms are due. Sheep, too, are seen to be unusually intent on their grazing when bad weather is imminent. Rut that a red sky is everywhere the shepherd's delight has lone since been proved to be a fallacy
Julian