Think of the New England climate in summer. Rufus Choate describes it
eloquently: "Take the climate of New England in summer, hot to-day, cold
to-morrow, mercury at eighty degrees in the shade in the morning, with a
sultry wind southwest. 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
off all the dams and bridges on the Penobscot and Androscoggin. Snow in
Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by
lightning 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 summer, with its bland
south winds and mitigated sunshine, brings all up, and about the 25th 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."

Poets love to sing of the sympathy of Nature. I think she is decidedly
at odds with the farming interests of the country. At any rate, her
antipathy to me was something intense and personal. That mysterious
stepmother of ours was really riled by my experiments and determined to
circumvent every agricultural ambition.

She detailed a bug for every root, worms to build nests on every tree,
others to devour every leaf, insects to attack every flower, drought or
deluge to ruin the crops, grasshoppers to finish everything that was
left.

Potato bugs swooped down on my fields by tens of thousands, and when