Wood County Reporter

How Coal Ashes Affect the Wind.

The wind is governed by atmospheric changes and coal ashes. We don't know, positively, which has the greater influence, but we are inclined to stake our all on coal ashes. We do not believe that all the atmosphere about us can control the wind to the degree that one hod of coal ashes can when passing through a sieve in the hands of a man who has got his best suit of clothes on. We remember an occasion, when the wind was blowing direct from the west, and had been blowing from that direction all day, and bid fair to blow from that direction as long as there was any direction left, that a man (whose name we need not mention) dressed in his best suit of clothes, and with pomade on his hair, stood on the west side of a sieve of coal ashes and undertook to screen them. We remember, too, and we remember it with vividness that is quite remarkable—that when he had gyrated that sieve about three times, that western gale veered round to the east with such appalling promptness that before he could make the slightest move to save himself he had disappeared—Sunday clothes, pomade, and all—in a blinding cloud of ashes, out of which immediately emerged the most extraordinary wheezing, sneezing, and coughing ever heard in that neighborhood. One sieve full of coal ashes, with the operator dressed for church, has been known to change the wind to thirty-two points of the compass.—Danbury News.