Nerviest Little Man in Nebraska

1907

Raymond Weber, Aged 4

He didn't cry, although his father did when the latter found him alive at bottom of a well.

NEBRASKA CITY, Neb., March 9 — Raymond Weber, of this city, is only 4 years old, but he has won distinction of being the nerviest little man in Nebraska. Raymond is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Weber. He was playing in the yard with his 7-year-old brother, and the two went to the well and looked down.

There they saw a silver speck, and they wondered if it were really water and if there were gnomes and fairies and things down there. Raymond leaned way over to see. Suddenly he lost his hold and down he went. His brother ran screaming away, but soon the neighbors for a mile around were on the scene.

It was twenty-five feet to the bottom, and a windlass had to be rigged. Soon the father was going down with a load on his heart as heavy as lead, but hoping also. At the bottom he found his boy, standing in a foot of water, cool and with not a tear. "Me wet, papa," he said, as the sobbing man gathered him up.

Wet and Dry Moons

1910

There is an old superstition, which dies hard, that the position of the horns of the new moon tells what the weather will be; if the horns of the crescent are on the same level, it will hold water, and hence it is a dry moon; but if it is tipped up, then the water will run out, and it is a wet moon.

One thing has helped keep this belief alive; the moon is "dry" in the part of the spring that is usually fair, while it is "wet" during the season of autumn rains.

If this were a sure sign of the weather we could have our predictions years in advance, for an astronomer can predict the exact position of the moon at any time in the future.

The cause for the different positions of the crescent is simple: The moon is south of the sun in the autumn and north of it in spring. The crescent is found by the light of the sun falling on the moon, and the horns are naturally in a line perpendicular to the direction of the sun from the moon.

That is all there is to it.