How high are the clouds?

The clouds above our heads are really flying fogs. They float in the air like puffs of cotton floating on the water. The winds and breezes push them along and blow their misty scarves and pillows from one shape to another. But after a time, the merry ride comes to end. Most of the frothy clouds turn dark and tumble down in drops of silver rain.

The lowest clouds are too lazy to get off the ground at all. They are the filmy, white mists and gauzy, grey fogs that spread around us, hiding the scenery. Other clouds are no higher than the tree tops and others are high enough to fold their 6oft blankets around the mountain peaks. But some clouds fly a mile or more above our heads. Some are five, six or seven miles up in the sky.

But no cloud can climb 20 miles above the earth. In fact, it is very hard for a cloud to get ten miles above the ground and few if any of them ever get this high. The highest clouds are those small, feathery coils of frosty white. We call them cirrus clouds and they are made of fine fragments of ice. Cirrus clouds are often six or seven miles high.

A great thunderhead piles up a huge mountain of pearly grey clouds. Its base may be quite close to the ground, but the top of its head may reach up seven miles. The strekky grey clouds with their dark promises of rain are usually about a mile above our heads. Th9y are the flat stratus clouds that often catch the bright colors of she sunset.

Many kinds of clouds drift and hover between the high cirrus clouds and the low stratus clouds. The so called mackerel sky is made from puffy little clouds that look like flocks of sheep.

Sometimes a cloudy white haze covers the sky, hiding the sun behind a gauzy veil. These floating fogs are usually    about two miles above the ground.

Everybody's favorite clouds, of course, are those fluffy white pompons that float lazily over the blue summer sky changing their shapes from piglets to peonies, from castles to camels. These are the cumulus clouds and they drift over land and sea between one and two miles high.

Sooner or later, the carefree life of a cloud must come to an end. It may travel a long, long way but all the time it is gradually sinking. Our by hour it changes, for it is at the mercy of the changeable weather. Fluffy white cumulus clouds become glowing stratus clouds or raging thunderheads. The filmy mist turns to silver raindrops or bullets of hail.