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THE WEATHER
ADDRESS AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY FIRST
ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY
The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant-The Weather of New England."
"Who can lose it and forget it?
Who can have it and regret it?
Be interposer 'twixt us Twain."
--Merchant of Venice.
I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in
New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it
must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and
learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted
to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take
their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous
variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's
admiration--and regret. The weather is always doing something there;
always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and
trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through
more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have
counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of
four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that
man that had that marvellous collection of weather on exhibition at the
Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all
over the world and get specimens from all the climes. I said, "Don't you
do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day." I told him
what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he
came and he made his collection in four days. As to variety, why, he
confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never
heard of before. And as to quantity well, after he had picked out and
discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather
enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to
deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of
New England are by nature patient and forbearing, but there are some
things which they will not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets
for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual
visitors, who bring their notions of spring from somewhere else, and
cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about spring. And so the
first thing they know the opportunity to inquire how they feel has
permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for
accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the
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: Probably northeast to southwest winds, 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 his postscript from his wandering mind, to
cover accidents. "But it is possible that the programme 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 dew-
drops, 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 dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax,
the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating,
intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong. |
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