shade, my 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 doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and
perhaps there is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object,
that has not its final use and value for some one or other. It is even
to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their
myriad correspondence upon the signs of the political atmosphere may
also fill their appointed place in a well-regulated universe, if it
be only that of supplying so many more jack-o'-lanterns to the future
historian. Nay, the observations on finance of an M.C. whose sole
knowledge of the subject has been derived from a life-long success
in getting a living out of the public without paying any equivalent
therefor