paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off what to-day’s
weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States,
in the Wisconsin region. See him sail along in the joy and pride of his
power till he gets to New England, and then see-his tail drop. He
doesn’t know what the weather is going to be in New England. Well, he
mulls over it, and by and by he gets out something about like this:
Probable northeast to southwest minds, varying to the southward and
westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer
swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail,
and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and
lightning. Then he jots down this postscript from his wandering mind, to
cover accidents: “But it is possible that the program may be wholly
changed in the mean time.” Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New
England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one
thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of
it–a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the
procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave
your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned.
You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under,
and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you
know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but
they can’t be helped. The lightning there is peculiar; it is so
convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn’t leave enough of that
thing behind for you to tell whether– Well, you’d think it was something
valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder. When the
thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up the
instruments for the performance, strangers say, “Why, what awful thunder
you have here!” But when the baton is raised and the real concert
begins, you’ll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the
ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in New England lengthways,
I mean. It is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little
country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you
will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and
projecting around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring
states. She can’t hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks
all about where she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak
volumes about the inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I
will give but a single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof.
So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well,
sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No, sir; skips it every
time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely to do honor to the
New England weather–no language could do it justice. But, after all,
there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you
please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would not like to
part with. If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still
have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its
bullying vagaries the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice
from the bottom to the top–ice that is as bright and clear as crystal;
when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and
the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond
plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns
all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and
flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again
with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and
green to gold–the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of