WEATHER COMPETITIONS 



IT is a piece of that delicious wit, which 

 flavors so much of James Russell Lowell's 

 writing, when he alludes, in "My Garden 

 Acquaintance," to the meteorological am- 

 bitions with which country people are so apt 

 to be bitten how each aspires to be hotter 

 and colder, to have been more deeply 

 snowed-up, to have more trees and larger 

 blown down, than his neighbors. But I 

 question whether Mr. Lowell should have 

 limited this delight in weather competitions 

 to country people ; for is it not with a certain 

 thrill of exultation that a city man opens 

 his newspaper on a bitter cold morning, 

 and reads that the mercury in his own 

 metropolis shrank lower by a degree or 

 two, at midnight, than in any other great 

 city in the land? That was a distinct 

 triumph which warms his heart with local 

 pride, and in consideration of which he is 

 quite content to have his ears and his nose 

 uncomfortably pinched as he hurries out to 

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