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.