CLIMATE AND HORTICULTURE OF NEW ENGLAND. 11 



Winslow, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote to England with 

 enthusiasm of the climate and the flora, the vines, sweet with their 

 delicious perfume, the wild " damsons," and the forest roses, and 

 the richness of the sea-food. 



No doubt he expected that June would last until December. He 

 had yet to learn of the power of the midsummer sun, and the parch- 

 ing droughts that were to threaten the very existence of the colo- 

 nists. His clusters of thick-skinned, foxy grapes have surel}- set 

 the children's teeth on edge ; his acrid damsons have disappeared 

 from our sj'lva ; and the treasures of food hidden in tlie sea-sands 

 chiefly serve to vary our sustenance during the season of clams. 



A true descendant of the Pilgrims, the eloquent Rufus Choate, 

 said: "Take the climate of New England in summer, hot today, 

 cold to-morrow, mercur}' at eighty degrees in the shade in the 

 morning, with a sultrj' wind south-west. In three hours more a 

 sea-turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the bottom of the ocean, 

 and a fall of forty degrees. Now so dry as to kill all the beans in 

 New Hampshire, then floods carrying oft' all the dams and bridges 

 on the Penobscot and the Androscoggin ; snow in Portsmouth in 

 Jul}', and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by light- 

 ning in Rhode Island. You would think the world was coming to 

 an end. But we go along. Seed-time and harvest never fail. We 

 have the early and the latter rains ; the sixty days of hot corn 

 weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us ; the Indian sum- 

 mer, with its bland south winds and mitigated sunshine, brings all 

 Tip, and about the 2oth of November, being Thursday, a grateful 

 people gather about the Thanksgiving board, with hearts full of 

 gratitude for the blessings that have been vouchsafed to them." 



There is a popular belief that rough and inclement climates are 

 the especial nurses of the spirit of independence ; hence the heroic 

 lines, alwaj-s quoted in the after-dinner speeches of our friends from 

 New Hampshire : — 



" Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, 

 And souls are ripened in our Northern sky." 



But is it not true in historj' that the barren and inhospitable 

 regions have been saved from enslaving conquest by their lack of 

 attraction to the conqueror? 



In Gibbon's first volume it is related that Scotland did not feel 

 the yoke of imperial Rome because of her rough climate. The 



