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.
