4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



regulating God's clocks, nor think 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 sym- 

 pathies. 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 

 neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe- 

 cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated 

 excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther- 

 mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable 

 of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The 

 other day (5th July) 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 neighbor ; 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 vul- 

 garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be- 

 came 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 



