4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply 

 the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to 

 value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, 

 capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. 

 The other day (July 5) I marked 98 in the shade, my high- 

 water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it 

 before. I happened to meet a neighbour; as we mopped 

 our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 

 100, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the 

 heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; 

 but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an 

 oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once 

 rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as 

 indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any 

 graduation but our own) ; but it was a poor consolation. 

 The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tip- 

 toe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something 

 of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared 

 in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt 

 that he had a true country-gentleman s interest in the wea 

 thercock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn 

 ing was, like Barabas s, 



Into what quarter peers my halcyon s bill ? 



It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, 

 distracting one from too continual study of himself, and lead 

 ing him to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements 

 than his own. Did the wind back round, or go about with 

 the sun ? is a rational question that bears not remotely on 

 the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little 

 doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many 

 different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, 

 would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying 

 its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first 

 sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of 

 those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the 

 temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless 

 sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is 

 no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that has 

 not its final use and value for some one or other, It is even 

 to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors 

 and their myriad correspondents upon the signs of the poll- 



