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 100o, 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 vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity
became 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 it was a poor consolation.
The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could
look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar
weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial
triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-
gentleman's interest in the weather-cock; that his first question on
coming down of a morning was, like Barabas's,

"Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill?"

It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind,
distracting one from too continual study of himself, and leading him
to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements than his own.
"Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun?" is a rational
question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the
prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated
observation of the vane in many different places, and the
interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it
were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to
give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial
than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the
wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are