<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"></SPAN></p>
<h2> SPEECH ON THE WEATHER </h2>
<h3> AT THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY'S SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL DINNER, NEW YORK CITY </h3>
<p>The next toast was: "The Oldest Inhabitant—The Weather of New<br/>
England."<br/>
<br/>
Who can lose it and forget it?<br/>
Who can have it and regret it?<br/>
<br/>
Be interposer 'twixt us Twain.<br/>
<br/>
Merchant of Venice.<br/>
<br/>
To this Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) replied as follows:—<br/></p>
<p>I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in
New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it
must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment and
learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to
make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take
their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is a sumptuous variety
about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration—and
regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending
strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the
people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in
spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred
and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours.
It was I that made the fame and fortune of that man that had that
marvelous collection of weather on exhibition at the Centennial, that so
astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all over the world and
get specimens from all the climes. I said, "Don't you do it; you come to
New England on a favorable spring day." I told him what we could do in the
way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he came and he made his
collection in four days. As to variety, why, he confessed that he got
hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never heard of before. And as to
quantity—well, after he had picked out and discarded all that was
blemished in any way, he not only had weather enough, but weather to
spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to deposit; weather to
invest; weather to give to the poor. The people of New England are by
nature patient and forbearing, but there are some things which they will
not stand. Every year they kill a lot of poets for writing about
"Beautiful Spring." These are generally casual visitors, who bring their
notions of spring from somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the
natives feel about spring. And so the first thing they know the
opportunity to inquire how they feel has permanently gone by. Old
Probabilities has a mighty reputation for accurate prophecy, and
thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the paper and observe how crisply
and confidently he checks off what to-day's weather is going to be on the
Pacific, down South, in the Middle States, in the Wisconsin region. See
him sail along in the joy and pride of his power till he gets to New
England, and then see his tail drop. He doesn't know what the weather is
going to be in New England. Well, he mulls over it, and by and by he gets
out something about like this: Probable northeast to southwest winds,
varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between,
high and low barometer swapping around from place to place; probable areas
of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes,
with thunder and lightning. Then he jots down this postscript from his
wandering mind, to cover accidents: "But it is possible that the program
may be wholly changed in the mean time." Yes, one of the brightest gems in
the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only
one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of
it—a perfect grand review; but you never can tell which end of the
procession is going to move first. You fix up for the drought; you leave
your umbrella in the house and sally out, and two to one you get drowned.
You make up your mind that the earthquake is due; you stand from under,
and take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you
know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but
they can't be helped. The lightning there is peculiar; it is so
convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that
thing behind for you to tell whether—Well, you'd think it was
something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. And the thunder.
When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape and saw, and key up
the instruments for the performance, strangers say, "Why, what awful
thunder you have here!" But when the baton is raised and the real concert
begins, you'll find that stranger down in the cellar with his head in the
ash-barrel. Now as to the size of the weather in New England lengthways, I
mean. It is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little country.
Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you will see
that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and projecting
around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring states. She
can't hold a tenth part of her weather. You can see cracks all about where
she has strained herself trying to do it. I could speak volumes about the
inhuman perversity of the New England weather, but I will give but a
single specimen. I like to hear rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of
my roof with tin, with an eye to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it
ever rains on that tin? No, sir; skips it every time. Mind, in this speech
I have been trying merely to do honor to the New England weather—no
language could do it justice. But, after all, there is at least one or two
things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced, by it)
which we residents would not like to part with. If we hadn't our
bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with
one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries—the
ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the
top—ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and
twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree
sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the
wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads
of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner
of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable
rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the
tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and
it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or
nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot
make the words too strong.</p>
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