4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide- 

 board about with them a delusion we often practise upon 

 ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable 

 finger-post which points every way and always right. It is 

 good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr. 

 White s, where Man is the least important of animals. But 

 one who, like me, has always lived in the country and 

 always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other 

 occult sympathies. Do we not share his indignation at that 

 stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no 

 lower than 4 above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the 

 coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded 

 into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our 

 fingers just as they were closing upon it ? No man, I 

 suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten 

 by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter 

 and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have 

 more trees and larger blown down than his neighbours. 

 With us descendants of 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 have 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-tiptoe, 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 



