The changes between wet and dry are much more frequent and sudden in
Europe than in America. Though we have double the rain, it falls in half
the time. Taking all these together, I prefer much the climate of the
United States to that of Europe. I think it a more cheerful one. It
is our cloudless sky which has eradicated from our constitutions all
disposition to hang ourselves, which we might otherwise have inherited
from our English ancestors. During a residence of between six and seven
years in Paris, I never but once saw the sun shine through a whole day,
without being obscured by a cloud in any part of it: and I never saw the
moment, in which, viewing the sky through its whole hemisphere, I could
say there was not the smallest speck of a cloud in it. I arrived at
Monticello, on my return from France, in January, and during only two
months' stay there, I observed to my daughters, who had been with me to
France, that twenty odd times within that term, there was not a speck of
a cloud in the whole hemisphere. Still I do not wonder that an European
should prefer his grey to our azure sky. Habit decides our taste in
this, as in most other cases.

The account you give of the yellow fever, is entirely agreeable to what
we then knew of it. Further experience has developed more and more
its peculiar character. Facts appear to have established, that it is
originated here by a local atmosphere, which is never generated but
in the lower, closer, and dirtier parts of our large cities, in the
neighborhood of the water; and that, to catch the disease, you must
enter the local atmosphere. Persons having taken the disease in the
infected quarter, and going into the country, are nursed and buried by
their friends, without an example of communicating it. A vessel going
from the infected quarter, and carrying its atmosphere in its hold into
another State, has given the disease to every person who there entered
her. These have died in the arms of their families, without a single