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
dew-drops, 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